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Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

In making the changes, VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

Medical experts said the implications of rule changes uncovered by the Guardian could be far-reaching.

They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”.

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Source: The Guardian, 16 June 2025

NHS call handlers are quitting amid burnout at dealing with 999 calls about suicides, stabbings and shootings and the long delays before ambulances reach patients.

The pressure is so intense that 27% of control room staff in ambulance services across Britain have left their jobs over the last three years, NHS figures show.

Many feel overwhelmed by the demands of their roles, unsupported by their employers and powerless to help patients who are facing life-or-death emergencies, according to a report by Unison, with some resigning within a year of starting the role.

Call handlers get so stressed that they took an average of 33 sick days a year each between 2021/22 and 2024/25, data obtained by the union also showed. That is far higher than the average four days taken off sick by workers in the UK overall.

A report by Unison found that call handlers’ jobs have become increasingly challenging in recent years as the demand for care, which rose during Covid, has remained consistently high since, while ambulance handover delays outside hospitals have worsened.

“These findings paint a bleak picture of the conditions faced by 999 control room staff. TV programmes about ambulance services don’t show things as they really are,” said Christina McAnea, the Unison general secretary.

Unison’s report said: “Relentless exposure to traumatic and increasingly complex incidents, verbal abuse, long shifts and low pay are contributing to stress, burnout and fatigue.

One call handler told Unison: “Some shifts are overwhelmingly traumatic, with 90% of the calls of a distressing nature. One shift, I handled three road traffic accidents and two cardiac arrests.”

“There’s a persistent pressure to remain on the phone, no matter how emotionally drained we are.”

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Source: The Guardian, 17 June 2025