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Man, 84, left lying on driveway after breaking hip

An 84-year-old man with heart conditions endured an agonising three-hour wait for an ambulance while lying on his damp driveway after breaking his hip.

Graham Woolston was driven to his home in Lowestoft, Suffolk, by his son Daniel Woolston last Friday before falling and injuring himself at about 22:20 GMT.

Despite his age and pre-existing medical conditions, coupled with the cold weather, paramedics did not arrive at the scene until about 01:20 GMT.

Neill Moloney, chief executive of East of England Ambulance Service (EEAST), said: "We would like to apologise sincerely to Mr Woolston and his family."

Mr Woolston had just spent eight hours in James Paget University Hospital, Gorleston, Norfolk, after experiencing dizziness over Christmas.

But after arriving home, he stumbled out of his son's car and hit the floor, shattering his hip and leaving him in excruciating pain.

After calling for an ambulance Daniel, 47, and his sister, with the help of neighbours, covered him in a duvet and blankets and used an umbrella to keep him dry.

Within an hour and a half of the fall, Mr Woolston started to look "a bit pale", so Daniel called the ambulance service again, but to no avail.

He was, however, told to get a defibrillator kit in the event his dad went into cardiac arrest, which he interpreted as being asked to "play paramedic".

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Source: BBC News, 3 January 2025

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Region targets prescription cuts under ‘enormous financial pressure’

All but one of a region’s integrated care boards have stopped prescribing gluten-free products to save money, with a charity saying the move will exacerbate inequalities and risk “debilitating symptoms”.

Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland ICB became the latest to withdraw funding for prescriptions for all gluten free food and mixes last month.

This means 13 ICBs nationally – nearly a third – have stopped them altogether, according to Coeliac UK. This includes all the boards in the Midlands region except Lincolnshire, according to LLR’s business case on the change.

LLR estimates the change will save it about £250,000 a year, and said in a statement it must “carefully consider expenditure for all conditions, balancing it with clinical risk and patient needs”, at a “time of significant financial pressure”.

NHSE updated national guidance in 2018 to say commissioners can choose to fund up to eight units per person per month of bread or flour mix, or bread, but also to permit them to “choose to end prescribing of gluten food altogether”.

At the time, it said the NHS was spending more than £15m a year on gluten free prescriptions, while there was “increased availability of these products in supermarkets and other food outlets”.

However, Coeliac UK's head of advocacy, Tristan Humphreys, told HSJ: “Our message to commissioners would be to remember the responsibility to reducing health inequality and the particular challenges faced by patients on low incomes.”

Gluten-free products are more expensive, and Mr Humphreys told HSJ there was still “limited availability” in rural or more deprived communities. 

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Source: HSJ, 2 January 2025

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‘We have to test food on our allergic toddler in A&E car park’

The parents of a severely allergic toddler have been forced to test potentially life-threatening new foods on her in a hospital car park, because there is not enough specialist allergy care in the Welsh NHS.

Nick Patterson and his wife Gemma, both 41, have to test changes to the diet of Seren, two, within running distance of an A&E department in case she goes into anaphylactic shock.

Seren suffered from severe eczema when she was three months old, and her parents suspected it may have been caused by allergies; however, medical staff told them they could not run tests on her until she suffered a confirmed allergic reaction. Instead, they told the parents they should just “be brave” and feed her new foods.

“It turns out we know [she is severely allergic] because one of the first times we weaned her she ended up in an ambulance to hospital,” Nick Patterson, a physics teacher from the Vale of Glamorgan, said. “Ultimately you have to be in the back of an ambulance with the blue lights on to be taken seriously.”

Seren was left gasping for air as her throat closed and her lips swelled after her first taste of cheese. She was taken to the GP surgery by her parents and received two EpiPen shots, before receiving another two in the ambulance taking her to hospital. She has been admitted to hospital with several more anaphylactic reactions since then.

The Pattersons said they have been unable to undertake an “oral food challenge” in the 18 months since the first time Seren went to hospital. This is a “gold standard” test, in which doctors gradually feed someone potential allergens to identify whether they can be tolerated or not. The service was not available in their local hospital run by Cwm Taf Morgannwg Health Board, but they are on the waiting list for the neighbouring Cardiff and Vale University Health Board.

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Source: The Times, 2 January 2025

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Parents of toddler who died from flu after hospital failings speak out on five-year wait for answers

The bereaved parents of a toddler who died from the flu after a “catalogue of failings” by a hospital say they are still waiting for answers about their daughter’s tragic death.

Cristiana Banciu died in January 2020 after a rare reaction to the flu, while under the care of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

In 2021, an inquest identified multiple failings by trust staff, who it found had “failed to provide basic medical attention” to the two-year-old.

Three years later, the trust agreed to pay her parents Alexandru and Georgiana £25,000 following a civil claim for bereavement costs and to cover Cristiana’s funeral expenses.

However, the couple say the trust has not admitted legal liability or sent a formal apology directly to them – an apology has only come via the media.

The parents want reassurance that such a tragic event will not happen again.

At Cristiana’s inquest, assistant coroner Jacqueline Devonish said healthcare professionals had “failed to provide basic medical attention”, which contributed to her death. The coroner could not, on the balance of probabilities, say that she would have survived had she been treated sooner, but suggested that she would probably have had a better chance, describing the failure to record her score on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) as “very serious”.

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Source: The Independent, 3 January 2025

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Slow progress on National Care Service ‘source of profound regret’

Care experts are calling on the government to act urgently on reform of adult social care after it was revealed that long-awaited proposals may not be delivered for another three years.

Ministers have announced the first step towards creating a National Care Service to ease the workload of the NHS.

A new package of support for the sector includes more funding for elderly and disabled people to make home improvements and stay out of hospital.

At the same time, health secretary Wes Streeting announced an independent commission led by Baroness Louise Casey would begin in the spring.

The first phase, reporting next year, will recommend medium-term reforms, and the second, expected by 2028, will advise on longer-term reforms.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said reform was long overdue, but that even if all went well, it would be the early 2030s before older people received any substantial benefit – 30 years after Japan and Germany modernised their social care systems.

“That’s a source of profound regret and it leaves today’s older people and their families to make the best of a system widely agreed to be letting many down,” she said.

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Source: The Independent, 3 January 2025

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USA: National Academies report calls for an NIH Institute dedicated to women’s health

For decades, knowledge gaps in women’s health research have left patients and clinicians with more unanswered questions and fewer medical breakthroughs, according to a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Society pays a price for this gap, the report stated, and addressing it will require $15.7 billion in new funding from Congress over the next 5 years.

Such an investment will help the National Institutes of Health (NIH) establish a new institute dedicated to women’s health, expand the field’s workforce, and support interdisciplinary women’s health and sex differences research throughout the 27 existing institutes and centers.

“There’s a dearth of studies for most female-specific conditions, leaving clinicians and patients without a path forward for diagnosis and treatment,” said Sheila Burke, BSN, MPA, cochair of the study committee and chair of the government relations and public policy department at the law firm Baker Donelson.

An average of just 8.8% of NIH spending from 2013 to 2023 focused on women’s health research, with the share of funding decreasing over time despite a steady increase in the overall NIH budget, the NASEM committee found. As a result, female-specific conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and uterine fibroids are underresearched.

Research is also lacking around menopause and pregnancy complications. Additionally, the committee highlighted the need for further investigations into conditions more common in women—such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis—and those that affect women differently than men, like heart disease.

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Source: JAMA Network, 27 December 2024

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Cancers getting diagnosed at earlier stage

The proportion of patients diagnosed with cancer at an early stage has risen to its highest level on record, NHS figures in England show.

Data for the 13 most common cancers show 58.7% of those diagnosed between September 2023 and August 2024 were identified at stages one and two, which increases the chances of survival.

That is 2.7 percentage points up since before the pandemic – and the highest since records began more than 10 years ago.

NHS England said a combination of public awareness campaigns and new screening approaches has made a big difference.

But despite the progress England is still struggling to achieve its ambition of diagnosing 75% of cancer at stages one and two by 2028.

And the NHS is also failing to hit its target for starting treatment quickly – nearly one in three people diagnosed with cancer wait longer than 62 days from an urgent referral.

According to a Nuffield Trust report, external last year these are all factors in why cancer survival rates in the UK lag behind many other comparable countries.

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Source: BBC News, 2 January 2025

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Father calls for industry changes after baby dies during 'hands-free' breastfeeding

The father of a seven-week-old boy who died after being breastfed in a baby carrier is calling for increased safety standards around baby slings.

James Alderman, who was known as Jimmy, was being breastfed "hands-free" within a baby carrier worn by his mother while she moved around their home.

Jimmy's father, George Alderman, told Sky News: "Baby slings are sold as being a lifesaver, allowing you to get on with your business while your baby's safe and close to you, but in this instance, we had our baby close, but not safe."

The inquest into his death heard Jimmy was in an unsafe position too far down the sling.

Mr Alderman said that while much of the available advice around slings focused on them not being too tight, few people were aware of the danger of the sling not being tight enough, and so allowing the baby to slump.

Explaining what medical experts think happened to Jimmy, he said: "After he'd been feeding, he fell asleep and then he slumped forwards. Then, because his head was covered and he had his chin against his chest, he was facing downwards.

"Nothing was covering his face, but because of the position he was in, that meant that not enough oxygen was going into his lungs because he was small and not fully developed, and that's why he stopped breathing."

Mr Alderman said that while many brands of baby carriers said they were safe for breastfeeding, the lack of advice around how to safely do it meant that parents were "left to work it out by themselves".

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Source: Sky News, 30 December 2024

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Hospital failings led to woman’s death after weight loss surgery, coroner says

Failings at a hospital contributed to the death of a 55-year-old woman who suffered abdominal sepsis after weight loss surgery at the time of a junior doctors’ strike, a coroner has said.

Susan Evans returned to Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, Hampshire, with stomach pains two days after undergoing elective gastric bypass surgery.

She was sent home without being seen by a member of the specialist bariatric team or a senior doctor, though hospital policy says this should happen, and became seriously unwell.

Evans returned to hospital and underwent two further operations but died a month after the original procedure.

In a prevention of future deaths report, the coroner Sally Olsen said neither written nor informal policies had been followed and failures “contributed more than minimally” to Evans’s death.

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Source: The Guardian, 1 January 2025

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Urgent referrals of children in mental health crisis in England rise 13% in year

The number of children referred to emergency mental healthcare in England has risen by 10% in a year, with lengthy waiting lists for regular NHS care pushing more to crisis point.

There were 34,793 emergency, very urgent or urgent referrals to child and adolescent mental health services crisis teams between April and October 2024, analysis of official data by the mental health charity YoungMinds found. That compared with 31,749 in the same six-month period in 2023.

Many of the children requiring emergency care – some of them suicidal or seriously ill as a result of eating disorders – have been stuck on NHS waiting lists for months or, in the worst cases, several years.

The chief executive of YoungMinds, Laura Bunt, said the figures were concerning and showed that thousands of children urgently required help earlier to prevent them from becoming seriously unwell.

“Early support would help prevent many young people from becoming more unwell, but instead their mental health is deteriorating, pushing them into crisis and in some instances putting young people’s lives at risk,” she said. “This is a shocking betrayal of young people and their mental health.”

She said tweaks to the system would no longer be sufficient to tackle the crisis. “We need major reforms that address the root causes of why so many young people are struggling. It must also be easier for young people to get help for their mental health when they need it. To make this happen, the government must urgently fulfil its promise to roll out early support hubs in every community.”

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Source: The Guardian, 2 January 2025

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Seven in 10 GPs in UK suffer from compassion fatigue, survey finds

Seven in 10 GPs suffer from compassion fatigue and struggle to empathise with patients because they are worn out from caring for them, a survey has found.

Family doctors say they are so emotionally and physically exhausted from hearing about patients’ problems and circumstances that it is compromising the quality of care they provide.

A poll of 1,855 doctors across the UK found that 71% of GPs and 62% of medics overall have experienced compassion fatigue, which undermines the doctor-patient relationship.

“Compassion fatigue is effectively a hidden, secondary trauma with symptoms that can ultimately make it extraordinarily difficult for family doctors to treat their patients,” said Dr John Holden, the chief medical officer at the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland (MDDUS), which undertook the survey.

GPs are “particularly vulnerable” to the syndrome because of their “prolonged exposure to patients’ suffering and trauma”, and their heavy workloads because the NHS is overloaded, he said.

Holden added: “The extent of compassion fatigue being suffered across all doctors is shocking but the impact on GPs is markedly more pronounced.”

Doctors being too exhausted to provide compassionate care “inevitably has an impact upon patient safety”, he said.

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Source: The Guardian, 2 January 2025

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Fraudsters steal £100m from NHS as scammers target hospitals

Fraudsters have stolen more than £100m from the NHS in the past five years, exploiting weaknesses in IT systems to commit crimes ranging from stealing credit card data to hacking supplier emails, The Independent can reveal.

Scams have cost the NHS the equivalent of funding more than 2,000 senior nurses’ salaries for a year or providing over 20,000 rounds of radiotherapy for cancer patients.

Experts warned that the “inexcusable” losses, revealed as part of an Independent investigation, were ones the already overstretched health service can “ill afford”, calling for the NHS to protect itself better against fraud.

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Source: The Independent, 31 December 2024

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The hospitals so rundown they are 'outright dangerous', NHS chiefs say

Multiple NHS hospitals are now so rundown they pose a serious risk to patient and staff safety, internal health service documents reveal.

Named and shamed facilities include Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport, three hospitals in Doncaster and Bassetlaw, Croydon hospital in south London, and multiple hospitals run by Barts Health trust, also in the capital.

Hazards include fires, floods from ageing pipes and tanks, electrical issues and even potentially dangerous bacterial infection from decaying infrastructure.

Some of the patients deemed at risk include cancer patients, those receiving life-saving care and even some specialist services caring for vulnerable babies. 

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Source: Daily Mail, 30 December 2024

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Scandal-hit nursing regulator accused of covering up critical internal review

Fresh calls have been made for a parliamentary inquiry into the Nursing and Midwifery Council – which is responsible for overseeing nearly 800,000 nurses, midwives and nursing associates in the UK – after it refused to publish the results of an internal review highlighting new failures to protect the public.

Senior staff at the NMC carried out an investigation this year into how the regulator had handled dozens of serious allegations against nurses and midwives after whistleblowers raised concerns last year.

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Source: Independent, 30 December 2024

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NHS ombudsman criticises CQC for failing to fully investigate boy’s death

The NHS ombudsman has criticised the service’s care regulator for failing to properly investigate the death of a five-year-old boy in a specialist unit.

The boy’s foster mother – an NHS doctor – has accused the care provider that looked after him of instigating “a cover-up” of how he died and frustrating her efforts to get to the truth.

The ombudsman has criticised the Care Quality Commission (CQC) for failing to act on evidence that emerged at the inquest into the boy’s death that cast doubt on the trust’s version of events.

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Source: Guardian, 31 December 2024

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Welsh Ambulance Service declares critical incident

The Welsh Ambulance Service has declared a critical incident because of increased demand across the 999 service and extensive hospital handover delays.

It said more than 340 calls were waiting to be answered across Wales at the time the critical incident was declared on Monday evening.

In addition, more than half of the trust's ambulance vehicles were waiting to handover patients outside hospitals.

The service is urging the public to call 999 only for serious emergencies as some patients continue to wait many hours for an ambulance.

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Source: BBC, 30 December 2024

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Patient Safety Movement Foundation's mid-year meeting charts course for global patient safety initiatives in 2024

The US Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) convened its annual Mid-Year Event to discuss safety challenges in the healthcare system that result in millions of preventable deaths around the world. Keynote addresses and roundtable discussions with renowned patient safety experts in a variety of fields focused on macro-level strategies to create a safer healthcare system with zero preventable harm.

A keynote by Carol Peden, Co-Chair of the Right Care Initiative, discussed lessons learned from the implementation of evidence-based strategies, including data transparency, and ways to reduce racial and socio-economic disparities in healthcare. Another keynote from David C. Stockwell, the Chief Medical Officer at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, examined next steps in applying the recommendations of the recent PCAST report to President Biden on the urgent need to addresses widespread preventable harms at U.S. hospitals. Albert Wu, MD, Director at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, discussed the importance of “just culture” and creating a blame-free culture in which individuals are able to report errors without fear of punishment.

Joe Kiani, Founder of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, stated, “From day one, we’ve worked to break the silos across the entire healthcare ecosystem to develop solutions informed by all stakeholders, including patients, and with multidisciplinary expertise. The mid-year meeting this year looked at solutions that will help us reach zero preventable harm faster. Momentum is everything. We see a clear pathway toward eliminating preventable medical errors, but we all have a part to play. We need to take action out of kindness.”

“We have an enormous opportunity to save lives around the world,” stated Dr. Mike Durkin, Chair of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. “It’s now time to bounce back from the impact of the pandemic, during which we learned firsthand of the dangers to patients and healthcare workers. We now need to maintain our momentum to reduce harm and work ceaselessly and collaboratively in all healthcare settings. This year, the World Health Organization will focus on diagnostic safety. We must continue to listen to our patients, their families, and healthcare workers and provide them a platform so that they feel safe in telling their stories without fear.”

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Source: Financial Post, 26 January 2024

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Hopes for changes in surgical menopause care

Hundreds of women who are "plunged into surgical menopause" are "being failed by the NHS", says a menopause support campaigner.

Diane Danzebrink, 58, from Norfolk, has called for an urgent review of surgical menopause care to ensure all clinicians know how to prepare their patients.

Ms Danzebrink, who founded Menopause Support, said awareness had improved significantly, but "we haven't seen change fundamentally to ensure every woman has access to good quality care at the time that she needs it".

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Source: BBC, 28 December 2024

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NHS patients at risk as hospital urgent repair costs triple in decade

A decade-long failure to address urgent repairs in hospitals across England has led to a dramatic rise in issues posing a “high risk” to patients and staff, ministers are being warned.

The cost of dealing with this backlog has almost tripled since 2015 in real terms, to £2.7bn this year. High-risk repairs have been the fastest growing part of the lengthy maintenance list over that time. It includes issues that could lead to serious injury to both staff and patients, or to major disruption of services or “catastrophic failure”.

The NHS lost more than 600 days – or 14,500 hours – of clinical time because of infrastructure failures in the last year, according to a new analysis seen by the Observer. The total maintenance backlog has now ballooned to £13.8bn in 2023-24, an 18% increase from last year. The figure is more than the NHS’s entire capital budget for the year.

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Source: Guardian, 28 December 2024

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Controversial face-down restraint still being used for mental health patients in England

Mental health patients are being pinned face down by staff thousands of times a year, despite ministers and health experts repeatedly warning that it is dangerous.

Prone restraint, in which someone is held chest down to defuse an incident, has been a source of controversy for years and been involved in the death of a number of people with mental health problems.

In 2014 the then coalition government responded to widespread concern about its use when it acknowledged that it “can result in dangerous compression of the chest and airways and put the person being restrained at risk” and told mental health units in England to phase it out.

But new NHS figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show that face-down restraint was used 5,247 times during 2023 and 3,732 times in the first 10 months of this year alone. “These findings are alarming,” said Danny Chambers MP, the party’s mental health spokesperson.

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Source: Guardian, 29 December 2024

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‘Gross failures’ in London hospital’s care may have led to disabled woman’s death

A coroner who ruled that “gross failure” in the hospital care of a disabled woman “possibly contributed to her death” has called for improvements to protect patients.

Graeme Irvine, the senior coroner for east London, said the inquest into the death of Chloe Every had revealed matters “giving rise to concern” while she was in the care of Barking, Havering and Redbridge university hospitals NHS trust.

He said there was a “risk that future deaths could occur unless action is taken”.

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Source: Guardian, 27 December 2024

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NHS at risk of paralysis while waiting for Wes Streeting’s reforms, says thinktank

The NHS is at risk of paralysis while it waits for Wes Streeting’s 10-year plan for reform and needs to be empowered to get on with change in the face of huge waiting times for care, a thinktank has said.

Victor Adebowale, a cross-bench peer and chair of the Institute for Public Policy Research, said a clear message is needed from Streeting that leaders in the health service should be able to start bringing in reforms where they are aligned with the government’s priorities.

He described long waits for care as “the tragic new normal” for many patients in the NHS and highlighted IPPR analysis showing that 25 times more people waited over four hours in A&E this summer than during the same period in 2009.

Lord Adebowale is also chair of the NHS Confederation, the membership body for health authorities and trusts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Writing in his role as IPPR chair, he said several senior NHS leaders have described to the thinktank “a feeling of ‘sitting and waiting’ for the 10-year plan, unable to initiate major change in the meantime”.

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Source: The Guardian, 26 December 2024

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"Wild west’: experts concerned by illegal promotion of weight-loss jabs in UK

Weight-loss injections are being aggressively marketed to British consumers through often illegal promotions, in a practice experts have described as a “wild west” industry of drug selling.

The booming market for jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro has triggered a price battle among online pharmacies, with even high-street chains cashing in on the soaring demand.

Last month, the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk revealed global sales of Wegovy hit £1.94bn in the third quarter of the year, up 48% from the previous quarter and outstripping expectations.

However, a Guardian review of reports by the watchdog that regulates medical advertising in the UK shows that many online pharmacies are flouting strict rules that govern how prescription-only drugs can be marketed in Britain.

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Source: The Guardian, 26 December 2024

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Mum dies after hospital's 'basic failures'

A woman died soon after the birth of her fifth child due to "basic failures" in her care, a report said.

Laura-Jane Seaman, 36, died at Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, Essex, on 23 December 2022 following a significant peritoneal haemorrhage.

A prevention of future deaths report by a coroner said the bleeding was not identified, despite Ms Seaman's repeated concerns that she was "gushing" - and her appeals to staff to "not let me die".

Ms Seaman had been admitted to the hospital on 21 December and while the birth of her baby was uneventful, she subsequently suffered a haemorrhage that was not noticed by staff for hours - despite her having a known history of haemorrhages.

Earlier this year, a coroner had found multiple "gross failures" by healthcare professionals and said if these had not occurred, Ms Seaman, from Witham, would not have died.

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Source: The Guardian, 24 December 2024

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‘Free and impartial’ addiction helplines paid secret commission by rehabs

Helplines that claim to offer “free” and “impartial” addiction support have been reprimanded by the advertising watchdog for hiding the fact they are paid thousands in commission by private rehabilitation clinics.

Amid record drug death rates and high demand for services, one website is promising “free, impartial, expert” advice for those trying to find the best treatment.

Another “advisory service”, listed high in Google search results, said it will help people “choose the best drug & alcohol rehab for you”. “We will give you guidance on the best options for your circumstances,” it claimed.

But while they look like nonprofit services and claim to offer unbiased help, the websites are fronts for brokers that direct people to partner facilities in exchange for a referral fee.

Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) issued rulings against seven companies, accusing them of misleading vulnerable people about the true nature of their businesses.

The ASA said that six brokers – Which Rehab?, Help 4 Addiction, Rehabs.UK, Rehab Guide, Action Rehab and Serenity Addiction Centres – had posed as direct treatment providers or impartial advice services when they were principally referral companies earning commission from partner facilities.

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Source: The Guardian, 22 December 2024

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