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‘I’m 43, blind and stuck living in a lockdown with my parents’

A blind man said he is living in a “personal lockdown” after having to move back in with his parents while waiting 18 months for vital support.

David Brookmyre, 43 and from Middlesbrough, had to quit his job and move 50 miles away to live with his parents last summer after the glaucoma he’s had since birth rapidly deteriorated. Now, he is unable to leave the house on his own and go out at night without careful planning.

“It's almost like a bit of a personal lockdown,” he told The Independent. “There’s one route I can take down the road with a bit of care because it’s a quiet path to where I live, but other than that, I need to be walking along with somebody, and this is why I was hoping to get some mobility training.”

Mr Brookmyre is one of thousands of visually impaired people who have been forced to wait for local authority training, known as vision rehabilitation, to help them relearn how to do things and live independently. Experts warn that without timely help, those experiencing sight loss will become isolated from society.

A Freedom of Information request by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) revealed that 20% of local authorities, including the likes of Newcastle upon Tyne, Brighton and Hove, and Croydon in London, have people waiting for more than a year to receive just an initial assessment of the services they need.

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Source: The Independent, 22 October 2025

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‘I worry my young patients will die’: UK’s eating disorder services not fit, say GPs

Young people with eating disorders are coming to harm and ending up in A&E because they are being denied care and forced to endure long waits for treatment, GPs have revealed.

NHS eating disorders services are so overwhelmed by a post-Covid surge in problems such as anorexia that they are telling under-19s to rely on charities, their parents or self-help instead.

The “truly shocking” findings about the help available to young people with often very fragile mental health emerged in a survey of 1,004 family doctors across the UK by the youth mental health charity stem4.

The shortage of beds for children and young people with eating disorders is so serious that some are being sent hundreds of miles from home or ending up on adult psychiatric wards, GPs say.

“The provision is awful and I worry my young patients may die,” one GP in the south-east of England told stem4. Another described the specialist NHS services available in their area as “virtually non-existent and not fit for purpose”.

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Source: The Guardian, 22 March 2023

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‘I was worried I was going to die’: why one NHS patient had to go private

Dee Dickens, 52, from Pontypridd, made the difficult choice to seek private healthcare even though she is ideologically opposed to it. After discovering a lump in her breast she was referred for a scan on the NHS’s two-week rule for suspected cancer. But after waiting six weeks, and being continually being told the waiting time was going up, eventually to a three-month wait, she was forced to pay for her own scan and appointment privately.

“In February last year, I found a lump in my breast, and went to the doctor that day. The doctor examined me and said, ‘I don’t like that.’ She said the lump was the size of the top of her index finger and she would rush me through for an urgent screening that would take no longer than two weeks.

“Two weeks later, I’d heard nothing so I gave them a call. They said that because of Covid, things had slowed down and it might take four weeks. 

“A week later, one of my breasts had swelled up. It was itching and hot and it felt like it was infected. I felt unwell, too. But I was stressed to the gills. Every day, I was worried I was going to die. We know that we’re against the clock when it’s cancer.

“I went straight back to the doctor and she rang the hospital. They said, ‘We will put your patient right at the top of the waiting list, but it will now be six weeks.’

“At six weeks, I still hadn’t heard anything, so I called the hospital. They said that I was at the top of the list still, but it would now be 10 weeks. The wait was going up because, during the worst of Covid, they hadn’t seen anyone so they were now on catchup."

“I’d had enough. Every single day I was more and more worried and my mental health was worse and worse, and my family was having to deal with me crying over stupid things. been talking about going private. But I’d been resistant – we’re both very leftwing and believe passionately in the NHS.

However, in the Dee made an appointment with a private clinic. She was seen immediately.

“After the scan, the doctor told me that the lumps were glandular tissue. The swelling, the pain and itching – were all stress related. As soon as he said, ‘You’re not going to die,’ they stopped.

“The NHS is the only thing I’m truly proud of in the UK. What worries me is I can see it disappearing, if not in my lifetime then in my children’s lifetime. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to go private. It felt absolutely awful to have to make the choice I did.

“On the one hand, I knew I would have an answer. But on the other, I knew there were so many women who wouldn’t be able to do what I was doing. I felt guilty, I felt I’d put my own life above my principles."

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Source: The Guardian, 11 September 2022

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‘I was told to live with it’: women tell of doctors dismissing their pain

As a teenager, Kelly Moran was incredibly sporty: she loved to run and went to dancing lessons four times a week. But by the time she hit 29, she could barely walk or even drive, no longer able to do all the activities she once enjoyed. She had pain radiating into her legs.

Her pain was repeatedly dismissed by doctors, who told her it was in her head. She moved back to her parents’ house in Manchester and left her job. She decided to seek treatment privately and was told she had endometriosis. Soon, with the right treatment, her life improved.

Kelly is among dozens of women who got in touch to share their stories with the Guardian on the topic of women’s pain. Women are almost twice as likely to be prescribed powerful and potentially addictive opiate painkillers than men, a Guardian analysis shows. Data from the NHS Business Services Authority, which deals with prescription services in England, shows a large disparity in the number of women being given these drugs compared with men, with 761,641 women receiving painkiller prescriptions compared with 443,414 men, or 1.7 times, and the pattern is similar across broad age categories.

The women who reached out said they felt that they were often “fobbed off” with painkillers when their problems required medical investigation.

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Source: The Guardian, 16 February 2021

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‘I was devastated’: MP hopes her story will help improve maternity care for disabled women

When doctors tried to work out whether Marie Tidball would need a specially designed birth plan, one asked her to lie fully clothed on the bed and spread her legs in the air so they could see how far they could open.

The incident was one of several occasions when Tidball, now a Labour MP, felt neglected during her pregnancy and early motherhood because of the NHS’s failure to adapt on account of her physical disabilities. Tidball has physical impairments affecting all four of her limbs and had major surgeries on both her hips and legs as a child.

She is speaking publicly about her experiences for the first time to highlight a report showing that disabled mothers and their children have significantly worse neonatal and postnatal NHS care than others.

Speaking about the doctor’s request to open her legs, Tidball told the Guardian: “I was shocked, really, that that was their approach, rather than actually looking properly at some of my medical history and the notes around my hips.

“They didn’t think about how that orthopaedic surgery might interact with birth, but also [about] carrying the baby and the way the baby was lying in uterus. They just hadn’t really thought those intersections through.”

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Source: The Guardian, 5 March 2025

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‘I want to hide under the covers’: Female NHS staff suffering stress and exhaustion amid coronavirus crisis

Women working in the NHS are suffering from serious stress and exhaustion in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, a troubling new report has found.

Some 75% of NHS workers are women and the nursing sector is predominantly made up of women – with 9 out of 10 nurses in the UK being female.

The report, conducted by the NHS Confederation’s Health and Care Women Leaders Network, warns the NHS is at risk of losing female staff due to them experiencing mental burnout during the global pandemic.

Researchers, who polled more than 1,300 women working across health and care in England, found almost three quarters reported their job had a more damaging impact than usual on their emotional wellbeing due to the COVID-19 emergency.

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Source: The Independent, 25 August 2020

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‘I waited 10 months for a routine hospital appointment - then ended up in A&E’

When Pippa Dungey went to her GP suffering from numbness in both her legs last year, she was told she faced a waiting list of 10 months for specialist neurology services.

Two months later, the 25-year-old trainee solicitor, from southeast London, ended up in A&E unable to walk.

Ms Dungey first went to see her doctor in September last year and was referred to a neurologist, but warned to expect a long wait for an appointment.

As she waited, her symptoms worsened, and eventually they became so bad she was unable to lift her right leg and forced to drag it around.

She sought help from A&E and her GP, but was turned away and told she would have to wait for her neurology appointment.

But eventually she was forced to go back to A&E, where she was admitted for a week and unable to walk and was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Ms Dungey said: “By November I was really concerned. I couldn’t lift my right leg and was just dragging it around, which was really scary. I felt like I’d been hung out to dry and didn’t know who to turn to. Everyone was telling me that they couldn’t do anything. I even tried to go privately, I was exhausting every avenue and didn’t know what to do."

Ms Dungey was one of the hundreds of thousands of people waiting for NHS neurology services - 6,175 of whom have been waiting for more than a year.

Charity the MS Society has warned people living with MS were waiting an average of five months for their first neurology appointment in 2023-24, a 65 per cent increase on the average wait time in 2019-20.

The charity have warned MS patients left waiting are at risk of “irreversible disability” and have said the government has so far overlooked neurological conditions in its 10 year plan.

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Source: The Guardian, 3 September 2025

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‘I thought she’d be safe’: a life lost to suicide in a place meant for recovery

"I thought she would be safe at Chadwick Lodge,” said Natasha Darbon, recalling how she felt in April 2019 when her 19-year-old daughter, Brooke Martin, was admitted to the mental health hospital in Milton Keynes.

Eight weeks later, Brooke took her own life.

The jury at the inquest found that Brooke’s death could have been prevented and that the private healthcare provider Elysium Healthcare, which ran the hospital, did not properly manage her risk of suicide. It also found that serious failures of risk assessment, communication and the setting of observation levels contributed to her death. Elysium accepted that had she been placed on 24-hour observations, Brooke would not have died.

In 2018, Brooke, who was autistic, was repeatedly sectioned under the Mental Health Act because of her escalating self-harm and suicide attempts. After a spell in an NHS facility in Surrey she moved to Chadwick Lodge, which specialises in treating personality disorders.

After a few weeks there, Brooke was doing well and staff were pleased with her progress. She was due to move to Hope House, a separate unit at the hospital, to start more specialist therapy for emotionally unstable personality disorder, and was keen to make the switch.

But then the teenager’s mental health deteriorated again. On 5 June 2019 she tried to kill herself. Five days later she was seen twice that evening secretly handling potential ligatures, but no appropriate action was taken. A few minutes later she was found unresponsive in her room. She received CPR but died the next day in Milton Keynes university hospital.

After hearing the evidence about the care Brooke received in her final days, Tom Osborne, the coroner at the inquest, took the unusual step of issuing a prevention of future deaths notice. He sent it to Sajid Javid, the health secretary, and to Elysium Healthcare, as the owner of Chadwick Lodge.

It set out the detailed criticisms that the jury had made of Elysium’s interaction with Brooke after her attempt to take her own life on 5 June. They cited the hospital’s failures to communicate information regarding Brooke’s suicide attempt, to search her room after she was found handling potential ligatures on the night she died, and to place Brooke on constant observations afterwards.

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Source: The Guardian, 24 April 2022

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‘I thought a vaginal mesh would help - instead it left me sobbing in agony’

Women suffering complications from vaginal mesh implants, including after removal, are calling on the Government to overhaul the compensation process.

Sharon Marchant, 61, from Bedfordshire, is one of thousands of women living with life-changing complications from a vaginal mesh implant.

Vaginal mesh, which is made from the same material used to make drinks bottles, is an implant used to treat pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence.

For years it was viewed as the gold standard treatment for incontinence and prolapse in many women, but was later found to cause debilitating side effects including infection, pelvic and leg pain, difficulty urinating, pain during sex, and incontinence.

Earlier this week it was revealed that propylene, the material used commonly used in vaginal mesh implants starts to degrade within 60 days of being implanted in the pelvis.

Ms Marchant told i of the severe physical and mental pain she suffered due to her vaginal mesh implant.

In 2014, she was recommended for a mesh implant after being diagnosed with stress-caused urinary incontinence.

At the time, Ms Marchant did not know much about the vaginal mesh. “I hadn’t heard anything about it – good, bad or indifferent.

“Having been a nurse in my younger years, I just thought, well, if they’re doing this, they must know what they’re doing,” she said.

Within weeks she noticed something was wrong.

“I could feel something that was uncomfortable. And so I had to do a self examination, and then I very quickly realised with the use of a mirror, there was a very large lump of blue mesh exposed.”

She opted for a complete removal of the mesh and is relieved it is now gone. But as a result her stress incontinence worsened, requiring her to take new medication and does not feel comfortable enough to start a new relationship.

“It’s just taken away a huge portion of my life,” she said.

Some women are so desperate for the procedure they are travelling to the US and paying up to £30,000 for the procedure, i was told.

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Source: iNews, 26 October 2024

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‘I lived, Maeve died’: ME patient who got help writes to coroner

A patient with severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) has told a coroner that the death of a young woman could have been avoided if she received the same tube feeding which has kept him alive for the past decade.

Whitney Dafoe, a 41-year-old American who suffers from the debilitating disease also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), has written a letter to Deborah Archer, the assistant coroner for South Devon, describing the death of Maeve Boothby O’Neill as a travesty.

Archer has been holding an inquest into the death of Boothby O’Neill, who died aged 27 in October 2021 after suffering with severe ME which left her bedridden and starving because she was too exhausted to eat.

Archer, who will deliver her verdict and findings on Friday, was told by NHS consultants that they could not attempt total parenteral nutrition (TPN), a type of tube feeding which bypasses the gastrointestinal tract and places nutritional fluids into a vein, because they couldn’t feed Boothby O’Neill while she was lying flat. Nor could they create “the required sterile conditions” in her bed, they said, because she couldn’t bear to be washed for periods of time.

In a letter to the court, Dafoe said that Boothby O’Neill’s death could have been avoided had she undergone the procedure. 

“Luckily, I had doctors who viewed ME/CFS as the serious physiological disease that it is, and understood that the risk of needing to take antibiotics occasionally or add a few extra steps to my daily routine was better than the certainty of death from starvation, dehydration or malnutrition, which is what killed Maeve.

“Maeve just needed a way to get nutrition into her body. I got TPN and lived. Maeve was denied TPN and died.”

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Source: The Times, 8 August 2024 

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‘I kept begging for pain relief’: the women forced to give birth without gas and air

Some hospitals are suspending supplies of gas and air, after it was found to pose health risks to midwives. What can be done to ensure pregnant women still get the help they need?

When Leigh Milner was expecting her first baby, she knew exactly how she wanted her labour to go. Her birth plan included an epidural for the pain and she was hoping, she says ruefully, for “all the drugs”. But that is not how things worked out. Milner, 33, a BBC presenter, ended up giving birth to Theo at Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow last month with nothing but paracetamol for pain relief, in what she calls a positively “Victorian” experience.

“I kept begging over and over again – ‘I need something for pain relief’ – and the only thing they could give me was paracetamol because they didn’t have gas and air. I was quite frightened, I didn’t know what else to do,” says Milner.

"Birth is painful, but it shouldn’t be traumatic.”

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Source: The Guardian, 16 March 2023

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‘I just want to feel like me again’: the women still waiting for breast reconstruction years after lockdown

At the height of Covid, hundreds of cancer patients had mastectomies without the reconstruction that would normally accompany them. They would eventually get the surgery, they were told – but for many that promise feels more meaningless by the day

Every time she lifts her arms to get dressed or hang out her washing, Julie Ford gets a painful reminder of one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. At 7am one day in April 2021, she had gone into hospital, alone and wearing a mask, to have her right breast and lymph nodes removed in a bid to stop breast cancer from spreading. Later that day, still groggy from the anaesthetic, in pain and with surgical drains hanging from both sides of her chest, she had staggered to the door with the help of two nurses. She was eased into a friend’s car and driven home to fend for herself.

While Julie’s breast had been removed, it was not reconstructed. Usually, both procedures are carried out in the same operation. But as reconstruction using tissue from the patient’s abdomen is a complex, eight-hour procedure requiring a large surgical team, it was considered “non-essential” and paused by most NHS trusts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Like hundreds of women with breast cancer who underwent urgent mastectomies without reconstruction in 2020 and 2021, Julie was assured she could have the procedure once Covid restrictions lifted.

But five years later, Julie, now 62, is still waiting.

A national shortage of specialist surgeons and theatre space, as well as the need to prioritise new cancer cases, means many women like her, who had breasts removed during lockdown, feel they have been abandoned. They live in daily physical discomfort and mental distress as they continue to await the reconstructions they were promised years ago.

A 2024 study found at least 2,200 patients who have survived breast cancer, or who were at high risk of developing it, were waiting for surgery across 40 NHS centres in England, with an average wait of 2.5 years.

And Wood fears there is little to encourage struggling hospitals to clear the backlog. Instead of investing resources into “expensive and lengthy” surgeries such as breast reconstructions, NHS trusts that want to reduce the size of their overall waiting list have an incentive to prioritise quick, simple operations where several patients can be ticked off the list in a short time, he says. “There are capacity issues, with growing demand and a shortage of theatre time and surgeons’ time, but to tackle it you need to have [NHS trust] management that is bothered to find a solution, not just sit on their hands.”

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Source: The Guardian, 13 April 2026

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‘I have had to wait over four years and counting to rid myself of excruciating vaginal mesh’

June Dunne used to love walking but she is now plagued by such excruciating pain that she can no longer manage a 20-minute stroll to her local supermarket.

“I am on morphine patches every day,” the 64-year-old, who is from Liverpool, tells The Independent. “It stops me from going on nice walks. I used to walk everywhere, but now I just potter around the house. I no longer walk to the shops. The supermarket is about a 20-minute walk - my son takes me in the car.”

Ms Dunne explains she got vaginal mesh implanted 14 years ago but the mesh did not work and has instead left her in agony - adding that she has been on a waiting list to have the mesh removed since 2019.

She is not alone; earlier in the month it emerged 140 women who experienced distressing side effects after getting vaginal mesh implants have won payouts expected to stretch into millions of pounds in England.

The women, whose case is the first successful group claim in England, have come to a settlement with the manufacturers Johnson & Johnson, Bard, and Boston Scientific but the exact amount of the payments is yet to be revealed. 

They claimed the implants, which are for stress urinary incontinence and prolapse, caused infection, bleeding, chronic pain, bladder and bowel perforations, and problems urinating, among other complications.

Many of the women were forced to have surgery to get the mesh removed and some still have ongoing issues as a result of the implants.

Lisa Lunt, partner at Pogust Goodhead, the law firm representing the women over the vaginal mesh claims, told The Independent: “Women implanted with transvaginal mesh have experienced years of chronic pain and suffering.

“Hundreds of women were prevented from making a claim due to strict 10-year time limits that are in force from the date that the product was manufactured. It’s about time that the government took action to increase the time limits."

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Source: The Independent, 28 August 2024

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‘I had to do an 80-mile trip’: the stress caused by UK drug shortages

Patients have described the effect on their health and wellbeing of the “new normal” of drug shortages in the UK, which has led to three-month delays and 80-mile round trips to acquire medication.

Simon Bell, a 43-year-old data analyst from Tyne and Wear, has cystic fibrosis and requires medication that allows him to digest food. “For people with cystic fibrosis, the part of our pancreas which releases enzymes and allows us to digest food doesn’t work, so we have to take these tablets, which does the job of what’s missing from our pancreas,” he says.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Bell says he has been experiencing shortages of Creon 25000, the drug he takes, and once was unable to get his medication for more than three months.

Bell decided he had no choice but to stockpile the medication when he could get it, as the effects of going without the drug are much graver than taking a lower dose.

“I went three months without getting any, so after that I started just to build up stock by not taking my full amount of medication every month, so now I always keep three months’ supply. Doctors would never advise this but I feel like I have no choice,” Bell says.

The situation has prompted concerns for Bell that his other medications will begin experiencing shortages, which could make him seriously ill. “Kaftrio is an expensive drug that if we stop taking would make us really seriously ill,” he says. “If I couldn’t get hold of that medication that would have serious implications in terms of health, long-term health and my ability to work. It could be quite devastating.”

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Source: The Guardian, 18 April 2024

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‘I had the coronavirus months ago but I’m still too ill to work... or even watch TV’

When Dan Scoble came down with the coronavirus in March, all the classic symptoms landed in one fell swoop. “I had everything under the sun: a fever, temperature, fatigue and chest pain,” he said. “My head felt like a balloon.”

The 22-year-old, a personal trainer from Oxford who normally breezed through 10-mile runs, suddenly found himself bed-bound. He presumed it would soon blow over, but 12 weeks after falling ill as the country went into lockdown, he is still not back to normal.

Dan has left his house just five times in three months — twice to see his GP and three times to hospital. He still suffers from crippling fatigue, recurrent migraines and a persistent sore throat, as well as abdominal and musculoskeletal pain.

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Source: The Times, 14 June 2020

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‘I had no voice’: black mental health patients on surviving a care system they say is racialised

It has been more than four decades since Devon Marston, a 66-year-old community organiser and musician, was taken to a psychiatric hospital where he was restrained, injected and forced to take medication. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

“Everything was said around me and about me, but no one asked me how I was doing,” he said. “I had no voice, and there was no one to say: ‘Don’t do that to him,’ or: ‘Listen to him, hear what he has to say.’”

The experience had a profound impact on his life and put him on a path to campaign for better care for minority ethnic people experiencing mental distress. However, progress has been painfully slow.

“Nothing has changed. Everything is still the same – only it’s more covered up now by clauses in the Mental Health Act that make it look fair but the equality and justice are not there,” he said.

The most recent data paints a frightening picture. Findings from the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) latest report show that the number of adults sent for very urgent mental health care from crisis teams more than doubled between 2023 and 2024.

The report, published on Thursday, also raised concerns about the overrepresentation of black people being detained under the act, finding they are 3.5 times more likely to be detained than white people.

The damning report warned that people are becoming more unwell while waiting for help and are stuck in a “damaging cycle” of hospital readmission.

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Source: The Guardian, 13 March 2025

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‘I had no idea my baby was at risk’: The fight to raise awareness of pre-eclampsia

Pre-eclampsia affects between 1% and 5% of pregnant women, but more can be done to inform people about its dangers.

While pregnant with her son in 2015, Chipiliro Kalebe-Nyamongo’s pregnancy was generally smooth – until she reached about 33 weeks. She started to develop high blood pressure, and was admitted to hospital to be monitored. It was during this period that Kalebe-Nyamongo became concerned when she didn’t feel her baby’s movements as usual.

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Source: Guardian, 8 April 2024

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‘I had gestational diabetes during my pregnancy. Six years later, I’ve yet to receive any follow-up care’

Rates of type 2 diabetes are surging at twice the pace in younger women compared to their older counterparts, according to new analysis.

Charity Diabetes UK suggests this alarming trend could stem from "little or no follow-up care" for individuals who develop the condition during pregnancy.

Gestational diabetes (GD), characterised by insufficient insulin production leading to high blood sugar during pregnancy, typically resolves after childbirth.

However, those affected face a significantly elevated risk of subsequently developing type 2 diabetes.

Data compiled by Diabetes UK reveals a 47% increase in type 2 diabetes diagnoses among women under 40 between 2017/18 and 2023/24.

The charity has voiced concerns that inadequate postnatal care for GD, which impacts between 10 and 20% of pregnant women, is a significant contributor to these escalating rates.

Women with GD should be offered HbA1c blood tests to check for diabetes between six and 13 weeks after birth, and then once a year to measure average blood sugar levels.

The first annual gestational diabetes audit, which was published last year by NHS England, showed that only 57% of women had an annual HbA1c test after having GD.

It also showed that more than one in 10 (11%) of women with GD developed prediabetes within a year, while 15% developed type 2 diabetes within 10 years.

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Source: The Independent, 28 May 2026

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‘I grieve for the person I was before' - Covid inquiry to begin new phase

The public inquiry into the pandemic will start 10 weeks of hearings on Monday looking at the impact on patients, healthcare workers and the wider NHS.

Covid patients have been admitted to hospital more than a million times in the UK since the virus emerged in 2020, while countless others have had care for other conditions disrupted.

The third stage of the inquiry, external will also examine the impact on NHS staff, the use of masks and PPE in hospitals, the policy of shielding the most vulnerable and the treatment of Long Covid.

And for the first time, the stories of more than 30,000 healthcare staff, patients and relatives will form part of the material entered into evidence.

“It was absolutely horrendous. We were really struggling, having to scrounge around for masks and gloves,“ says Mandi Masters, a community midwife from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

At that early stage the NHS was, she says, “working in the dark” as the virus spread from China to Italy and then to the UK.

Later Mandi caught Covid herself – she is convinced at work – and ended up in hospital on oxygen for three weeks.

“My husband took me to A&E but had to leave me there, turn around and walk away,” she says.

“The news was coming out on how many health professionals were dying of Covid, but I was just too poorly to care at that point,” she says.

“Looking back, I have to admit, it was extremely frightening.”

Mandi, 62, has now returned to work part-time, but still struggles to catch her breath after a short walk.

Every cold or chest infection “wipes her out” and she “grieves for the person I was before Covid”.

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Source: BBC news, 9 September 2024

Related reading on the hub:

The pandemic – questions around Government governance: a blog from David Osborn

Respiratory protective equipment: An unequal solution for healthcare workers? A blog by David Osborn

Raising concerns about PPE and ventilation as a Junior Doctor, a blog by Lindsay Fraser-Moodie

PPE guidance continues to put staff and patients at risk, by Dr David Tomlinson

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‘I felt humiliated’: parents respond to NHS maternity care racial bias inquiry

Feeling manipulated into having medical procedures, dismissed by professionals and labelled with racial stereotypes are among the complaints of parents who responded to a national inquiry into racial injustice in UK maternity care.

A panel established by the charity Birthrights is investigating discrimination ranging from explicit racism to racial bias and microaggressions that amount to poorer care.

It comes as parliament is due on 19 April to debate the large racial disparity in maternal mortality in British hospitals, after a petition from the campaign group Five X More gathered 187,519 signatures. Black women are four times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or childbirth in the UK.

Testimonies include that of a British Bangladeshi woman who said her labour concerns were dismissed. “I felt unsafe and like maternity professionals are not used to being challenged by brown women,” she said. “There is a stereotype of Asian women that we are tame, quiet and compliant people who have no voice and will be obedient.

“I was treated like a vessel, not like a human. The experience left me feeling humiliated, disempowered and ashamed.”

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Source: The Guardian, 13 April 2021

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‘I felt doomed’: social media guessed I was pregnant – and my feed soon grew horrifying

Kathryn Wheeler can't remember where she was when her TikTok feed showed her a video of a woman holding her stillborn baby, but she remembers how she felt. "At first, it appeared like any other video of a woman holding a newborn. It was tightly wrapped in blankets while she cradled it in her arms. She was crying, but so are most of the women in these post-birth videos. It wasn’t until I read the caption that I realised what I was looking at. Her baby had been delivered at 23 weeks. I was 22 weeks pregnant. I felt doomed," she says.

Her social media algorithms knew she was pregnant before family, friends or her GP. Within 24-hours, they were transforming her feeds.

"On Instagram and TikTok, I would scroll through videos of women recording themselves as they took pregnancy tests, just as I had done. I “liked”, “saved”, and “shared” the content, feeding the machine, showing it that this is how it could hold my attention, compelling it to send me more. So it did. But it wasn’t long before the joy of those early videos started to transform into something dark."

The algorithm began to deliver content about the things you fear the most while pregnant: “storytimes” about miscarriages; people sharing what happened to them and, harrowingly, filming themselves as they received the news that their baby had no heartbeat. Next came videos about birth disfigurements, those found by medical professionals early on, and those that were missed until the baby’s birth.

On TikTok, there are more than 300,000 videos tagged under “miscarriage”, and a further 260,000 under “miscarriageawareness”. One video with the caption “live footage of me finding out I had miscarried” has almost half a million views. Another showing a woman giving birth to a stillborn baby has just under five million.

For Dr Christina Inge, a researcher at Harvard University specialising in the ethics of technology, these experiences are not surprising. “Social media platforms are optimised for engagement, and fear is one of the most powerful drivers of attention,” she says. “Once the algorithm detects that a person is pregnant, or might be, it begins testing content – the same as it does with any other information about a user. If a user lingers on an alarming video on pregnancy, even if just for a second, that is interpreted as interest. The system then feeds you more of the same.

“Distressing content isn’t a glitch; it’s engagement, and engagement is revenue,” Inge continues. “Fear-based content keeps people hooked because it creates a sense of urgency; people feel they need to keep watching, even when it’s upsetting. The platforms benefit financially, even as the psychological toll grows.”

The negative effect of social media on pregnant women has been widely researched. In August, a systematic review into social media use during pregnancy considered studies from the US, the UK, Europe and Asia. It concluded that while social media can offer peer-to-peer advice, support and health education, “challenges such as misinformation, increased anxiety and excessive use persist”. The review’s author, Dr Nida Aftab, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, highlights the role healthcare professionals should play in helping women make informed decisions about their digital habits.

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Source: The Guardian, 3 September 2025

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‘I feel so let down’: long waits for ambulances in south-west England

More than four hours after an ambulance was called, Richard Carpenter, 71, who had had a suspected heart attack, began to despair. “Where are they?” he asked his wife, Jeanette. “I’m going to die.”

She tried to reassure her husband that the crew must surely be close. Perhaps they were struggling to find their rural Wiltshire home in the dark. “But I could see I was losing him,” she said. She gave her husband CPR and urged him: “Don’t leave me.” But by the time the paramedics arrived another hour or so later, it was too late.

Jeanette Carpenter, 70, a stoical and reasonable person, accepts it might have been impossible to save her husband. “But I think he would have had more of a chance if they had got here sooner,” she said.

It is the sort of sad story that is becoming all too common. Across England, but in particular in the south-west, ambulances are too often not getting to patients in a timely manner.

Before Covid, said one ambulance worker – who asked not to be named – he would do between six and 10 jobs in a shift. Now if the first person he is called to needs to go to hospital, he expects this will be his one job for the whole shift.

“At some hospitals we are waiting outside hospitals for 10, 11 or 12 hours,” he said. “There’s nothing more demoralising than hearing a general broadcast going out for a cardiac arrest or road accident and there’s no resources to send. It’s terrible to think someone’s loved one needs help and we can’t do anything because we’re stuck at a hospital.”

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Source: The Guardian, 10 April 2022

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‘I developed ovarian cancer after my symptoms were dismissed as menopause’

A woman has said her ovarian cancer diagnosis was delayed after her symptoms were wrongly dismissed as menopause or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) – accusing her doctor of misogyny and medically gaslighting her.

Sbba Siddique, a 55-year-old business owner, told The Independent that “unconscious bias and cultural incompetence” were also to blame for her delayed diagnosis.

Ms Siddique, who lives in Berkshire, said she began to feel unwell around October 2021 but did not get diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer until March the following year.

“I was feeling really tired all the time. I had no energy. I was piling on weight that wasn’t there previously despite not changing my eating habits. I was needing to wee more,” the mother of three recalled.

“I was going back and forth with my GP trying to get an appointment. I couldn’t get a face-to-face – every consultation was on the phone or via online forms. That was part of the problem of the misdiagnosis.”

Her GP was “very dismissive” of her symptoms and attributed them to IBS or the menopause, she added.

“At the end of the day, I’m not the expert, the GP is – I believed him,” she said.

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Source: The Independent, 14 July 2024

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‘I am invoking Martha’s rule’: how a woman saved her father from near death in hospital

For six awful days last summer, as her father, David, got progressively sicker in the cardiac ward of the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, Karen Osenton would read the poster above his bed telling patients about their right under Martha’s rule to ask for a second opinion.

Her father, a retired engineer in his early 70s who was normally extremely fit, was by then thin, jaundiced and could barely lift his head from the pillow. 

David had first gone to his GP more than a month earlier complaining of extreme breathlessness, and over the following weeks he had become increasingly thin and weak with suspected heart failure. But it had taken repeated visits to the accident and emergency ward, being sent home each time, before he was finally given a bed in a specialist cardiac unit last July.

“Every day we saw him he got worse,” says Karen, a teacher from Aynho, in West Northamptonshire. “My mum kept saying: ‘Please, my husband is not right, this is not David. He is so unbelievably poorly.’ He couldn’t walk, he didn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat. Even the other gentlemen in the bay were saying to the nurses: ‘Can you not see this man is extremely unwell?’”

“He was on the edge of the bed, rocking, and he could barely speak. He was so yellow, so gaunt. I just walked to the desk and I said: ‘You will get a consultant here now. I am invoking Martha’s rule. I want somebody to see my dad right now.’”

Within minutes, says his daughter, the room was full of doctors. “He was very close to death. His lungs were filled with fluid. He had multi-organ failure. Within the hour he was in intensive care, fighting for his life.” A senior consultant told Karen her father was “the sickest person in the hospital”.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS foundation trust (OUH), which oversees the hospital, has apologised to the family and admitted it made mistakes in treating David’s cardiac failure. While some of the delays in assessing him were “unfortunately due to service pressures and staffing limitations”, the hospital said after a review of his case, clinicians also failed to spot that he was getting worse, and by the time they did, he was too unwell to have the recommended surgical valve repair. In addition, a “lapse in communication” meant there was confusion between two different teams over which was responsible for his care.

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Source: The Guardian, 1 May 2026

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