Skip to content

Health Care

Honey here is an ignorant tosser

When I was pregnant for the first time in 2020, I remember saying to my husband: “This country does not give a toss about the health of black people.” Why? As a pregnant woman and a sickle cell carrier, I was shocked to learn how little information is shared about this disease. Logging into pregnancy apps or reading NHS leaflets, you find an endless list of illnesses and conditions – genetic and non-genetic – that may affect your baby. Yet sickle cell was barely mentioned, despite it being the fastest-growing genetic disease in the UK.

Sickle cell affects those of West African heritage. Until recently this wasn’t, in fact, an issue among the British population. Of course, given recent immigration, it is becoming more of one.

The NHS is not known as being a hugely responsive organisation. And there we are, that’s all we need to know.

Could be, possibly…..

She added: “Mumsnet users tell us that they feel in many cases difficulties in seeking diagnoses and treatment are driven by misogyny, with women’s pain seen as less serious or valid than that of men, and women’s health concerns [are] dismissed, belittled or ignored.

That the NHS does not provide timely treatment is not news. That the wimmins’ care is worse than the chaps, well.

The attention paid to breast cancer over the decades, as compared to that given to prostate, might not quite bear that out really.

See, see? Told you so!

Mr Streeting’s argument focussed on Mr Farage’s suggestion that the health service, which may have caused 50,000 deaths due to delayed treatment last year, could move to the insurance-based model used in France in order to improve efficiency.

The Health Secretary framed NHS performance as a battleground between Left and Right, saying: “The failure of our public service to meet the needs of the people is a fertiliser for the populism we see across liberal democracies.”

He said that the NHS needed improvement in order to remove “the conditions where the populist Right thrive”.

Competition works!

OK, so far it’s only political competition leading to potential improvements in the NHS. But who thinks Wes would be bleating like this if he’d not got Reform breathing down his neck?

Logical, on the face of it

Obese patients and smokers face being sent to the back of the queue for NHS surgery under government plans.

Reforms announced by Sir Keir Starmer will mean that patients will only be given a date for an operation if they have been assessed as “fit to proceed”.

Tens of thousands of patients waiting for hip and knee surgery will be asked to first undergo a 12-week weight-loss programme, while smokers will be urged to quit.

Fatties might not need new knees if they were thinner. Smokers recover badly – or worse – from surgery. So, you know, sensible enough.

Except we all know how this will turn out, don’t we? You’ll not get near a knife if your BMI is even 25.1 and if you’ve even been in a room with an unlit tab.

There is also another issue. People in countries with functional medical systems are thinking “!2 weeks? Wait? For Surgery?”

New plans! New plans!

He said: “Our 10-year health plan will deliver three big shifts in the focus of healthcare from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. We will refresh the NHS workforce plan to fit the transformed health service we will build over the next decade, so the NHS has the staff it needs to treat patients on time again.”

Last year, health officials drew up a strategy – which would have seen a 49 per cent increase in hospital consultants by 2036 – but just 4 per cent more GPs.

Now, they will be told to “refresh” the plan to tip the balance in favour of services closer to home, meaning far more GPs, health visitors and community nurses trained and hired.

As I keep pointing out about the place GP training has been in the hands of govt for 80 years now. And they’ve not even been able to process really simple stuff – like the feminisation of the profession will lead to fewer working hours per GP trained.

That’s just one of the problems with government plans. Governments aren’t very good at planning.

Who?

The national debate on assisted dying is both moving and frustrating. The dark magnitude of British terminally ill teacher Nathaniel Dye’s words – “my very death depends on it” – weighs on the nation’s conscience.

Dark magnitude? Nation’s conscience? Fair bit of rhetorical puff being applied there.

This interpretation is misguided. For one thing, cold utilitarianism favours assisted death. The taboo that nobody dares to articulate is that assisted dying will leave society financially better off. The NHS spends most of its resources on palliative care for people in the final six months of their life.

What do you mean no one dares articulate? This is the very point that some of us have been shrieking. That the fiscal issues so heavily favour topping Granny that that’s what will happen. Therefore……

Assisted dying will also help people protect their family wealth. Those who are being forced to spend savings and sell assets to pay for end-of-life care will at least have an alternative option. While this might sound grotesquely materialistic, for many the ability to leave a parting gift to their family, and the reassurance that while they may no longer be with them in life, they can at least contribute to their security in death, is more precious than another few months in a hospice bed.

That any number of avaricious little bastards will thereby guilt Granny into taking the pills….

Critics of the Bill have warned that legalising assisted dying could lead to a slippery slope, with not just the terminally ill but the chronically ill becoming eligible and under pressure to end their lives. This argument seems naively narrow.

Naively narrow? But it’s the argument you’ve just made twice!

Jeebus. First they came for logic….

He may be right or wrong but this is deffo the way I think about it

In the report, Mr Teague writes: “Many of the safeguards promised by its supporters amount to nothing more than arbitrary restrictions, with no rational foundation. Reason demands their removal, propelling an irreversible expansion of scope that has already taken place in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

“This process is as logically inexorable as it is empirically inevitable, for the very arguments relied upon to justify physician-assisted suicide would also support the introduction of voluntary and, ultimately, non-voluntary euthanasia.”

I’m pretty sure we already have “non-voluntary euthanasia” or, as we might call it, murder. The Gosport Hospital and Liverpool Pathway cases seem to show that to me. In that latter there were bonuses for hitting targets of those “choosing” euthanasia. We know what targets do, right?

I do grasp my life my choice arguments. No, really. I’ve just no idea at all about how we move from where we are to a greater, erm, freedom without it descending into a welter of murder of little old Grannies.

Ever so slightly odd

An NHS nurse was suspended for more than two years after a patient claimed she was pregnant with his child, an employment tribunal has heard.

So, she worked on a ward for crims who were nutters. One of whom made the claim.

OK, well, we have had reports of warder and crims etc. So, investigate by all means:

Employment Judge Simon Loy said there were then a “series of extensions” to her suspension, which lasted for 29 months.

Among humans at lesat that’s long enough to sort out the pregnancy issue, no?

No, you don’t say!

Assisted dying is being abused in Canada with doctors coercing patients into ending their lives, members of the group who helped to legalise it have admitted.

Unfathomable.

According to the data, disproportionate numbers of people who ended their lives through assisted dying when they were not terminally ill – 29 per cent – came from Ontario’s poorest areas.

But, don’t we have the NHS?

Almost half of the UK workforce lack access to workplace health support including winter flu vaccinations and checks for cardiovascular diseases, a report has found.

The analysis, by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), looked at data from the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) and found that more than 10 million UK workers lack access to services including basic health checks, vaccinations, and smoking or weight loss support, provided by their employer.

The report found that the UK’s current workplace health system could further exacerbate existing health inequalities, given that people in lower paid industries, such as hospitality and agriculture, are even less likely to have access to health protection interventions at work.

Why would anyone need health care at work when the State already provides all?

Well, good luck, but….

He will add that this means moving more care from hospitals to the community, a shift from treatment to prevention and switching from analogue to digital services.

Prevention doesn’t actually save money. Because something catches up with us anyway. Which is where most of he expense isx, that lsat 6 months. The variable in health costs tends to be how many years of healthcare do you get before that lsat 6 months.

Yes, yes, this is tendency, not a certainty. But it’s as with baccy, booze and burgers saving the NHS cash because early deaths. On average that’s true.

Now, obviously, prevention has large private benefits that accrue to the patient. But it’s not a cure for the finances of the NHS.

Sadly, this is not true

Yes, yes, race science etc, ghastly stuff. And yet:

Does that mean race is a biologically meaningful definition? It does not. Race as we currently use it is a socially constructed idea, but one with biologically meaningful consequences, such as in healthcare where many disease outcomes are significantly worse for racial minorities. The impact of disease correlates significantly with socioeconomic factors, primarily poverty, and in our society racial minorities are mostly in lower social strata. Black and brown people endure worse medical outcomes not because they are black or brown, but because of this fact. The science very clearly evidences this, and no amount of cosplay race science – or human biodiversity, as they euphemistically brand their propaganda – can debunk it.

No, that’s going too far in the opposite direction. Thalassaemia in Med littoral derived genetics, sickle cell in West African (both, likely, deirved from beneficial malaria resistance), Tay Sachs in Ashkenazi, booze and lactose intolerance in East Asians, propensity to diabetes in Pacific Islanders and on and on. It is not – simply not – true that health differences are reliant solely upon socioeconomic status. But that’s what he’s trying to say here. A more equal society isn’t going to do away with any oof those things I’ve mentioned there now, is it?

But, but, this is selling the NHS!

Under the plans, submitted by private hospitals, the independent sector could treat up to 2.5 million more patients, with some treatment starting in weeks.

The private sector investment would be used to build a string of diagnostic centres for NHS patients across the country, tackling delays in cancer diagnosis, and to develop new surgery units and intensive care facilities.

That it’s clearly and obviously sensible won’t stop the shrieks now, will it. Be like introducing chasubles and thuribles into a Methodist church – it is indeed a religion, Our NHS.

My word, really?

Four key factors have been identified that together account for more than one-third of the inequalities in infant deaths between the most and least deprived areas of England.

Researchers say targeted interventions to address these factors – teenage pregnancy, maternal depression, preterm birth and smoking during pregnancy – could go a significant way to reduce inequalities, although higher-level structural changes to address socioeconomic inequality will also be necessary.

If rich and poor people all stop doing the bad things – the smoking etc – then why would reducing inequality make any difference?

Deprivation could have an effect, sure. So could absolute poverty. But relative poverty – inequality? How?

A simple theory

Which of course might suffer from that problem of being simple and wrong:

One possible explanation is the rise of the “western” diet, which is high in ultra-processed foods. A 2022 study of nearly 3,000 children and 4,256 adults in the US suggested that consuming ultra-processed foods was associated with allergy symptoms in children and adolescents. Perhaps the full detrimental impacts of ultra-processed foods are only now being recognised, as data is collected and analysed. There are close links between the gut microbiome and the immune system; similar concerns have been raised about their possible link to digestive-tract cancers in young people.

Another theory is that those who develop allergies are deficient in vitamin D, the vitamin our body produces when exposed to sunlight. Surveys have shown that children are spending an increasing amount of time indoors on screens instead of outdoors playing. This isn’t just a post-pandemic trend: it has been happening for more than a decade, alongside the growing use of tablets, games consoles and phones.

Other explanations have included the widespread use of antibiotics in young children (for ear infections or other ailments), which affect the digestive tract, rising air pollution and early exposure to skin infections. The health community will continue to look to scientists such as Turner, who is also a paediatric allergy consultant, to test the various hypotheses on why these allergies are developing and what can be done to prevent them in children.

The previous 50% death rate in children cdovered up a number of allergy deaths. Add in a bit of genetics – those who would have died did not and so the genes pass on down the generations – and here we are, two to three generations after the collapse of the child death rate with allergy problems.

It explains the available information but whether it’s correct or not is another thing.

Sure

Another pandemic as big as the Covid crisis that killed 7 million people worldwide is “a certainty”, Prof Sir Chris Whitty has warned, as he said that the UK’s lack of intensive care capacity for the sickest patients was a “political choice”.

Nature wants to kill us. Another pandemic is a certainty.

But let’s not do the idiot response next time, eh?

How very, very, weird

A woman has described feeling “suicidal” and “the most unwell I’d ever been” after undergoing plastic surgery in Turkey without mental health checks.

Nina — not her real name — has body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a condition that causes sufferers to become fixated on perceived flaws in their physical appearance.

In the UK, most surgeons will put patients through rigorous screening to assess mental health as well as physical health before taking deposits.

More mental health checks on getting your tits lifted than in having them sliced off. It’s possible that this is not the right way around.

Err, yes?

GPs are increasingly spending their time on a small proportion of patients with multiple illnesses, research has found.

Family doctors spend more than a third of their time on patients with three or more serious chronic conditions despite the group accounting for 16 per cent of the population.

The proportion of people with multiple illnesses has been climbing since the turn of the century and one in three have at least two serious chronic illnesses.

What used to be near immediate death sentences are now chronic illnesses to be managed. Therefore some have that several rather than being dead.

This is also what leads to that long running observation that smoking, fatties and booze save the NHS money. Because those do, still, cause the deaded in our beds. And thus save the NHS those years of care of multiple chronic illnesses. One of the oddities of health care economics is that a cheap and reliable cure for lung cancer would actually raise NHS costs over time…..