Adrian Francis walked into hospital in June 2023 as a physically healthy young man. Days later, having been left in an “immobile state”, he was dead.
The 33-year-old, who once represented Britain in sprinting, had been reduced to a catatonic state after health workers at Hallam Street Hospital in West Bromwich apparently pinned him down and forcibly gave him antipsychotic medication.
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Source: Independent
Wes Streeting has been accused of taking a “chaotic and incoherent approach” to reforming the NHS, which makes it unlikely the government will hit its own targets, according to a damning report by the Institute for Government (IfG).
The report praises elements of how the health secretary has managed the health service in his first year in office, including improving performance and staff retention in hospitals. The pay settlement he reached with resident doctors last year avoided a winter plagued by NHS strikes.
But it also criticises significant aspects of his performance, including the way he handled the abolition of NHS England and his lack of action to stem the exodus of senior GPs.
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Source: The Guardian, 15 November 2025
Read the report and the key findings: Public services performance tracker 2025: The NHS (Institute for Government & Nuffield Foundation, November 2025)
The article discusses concerns about proposed cuts to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in the UK and their potential impact on patient safety. ICBs are responsible for coordinating local healthcare services, but recent budget reductions could weaken their capacity to ensure effective oversight and patient safety.
Healthcare leaders express alarm that these cuts may exacerbate existing gaps in service oversight and lead to inconsistent quality of care across different regions. The article highlights that, although some improvements have been made in patient safety and local care integration, financial limitations could hinder further progress.
Experts warn that reduced resources may impair ICBs' ability to monitor performance, implement safety protocols, and respond to patient feedback, potentially putting vulnerable populations at greater risk. The article cites specific examples where local health entities have successfully tackled safety issues and improved patient outcomes, drawing attention to how vital ICBs are in facilitating such initiatives.
The article calls for comprehensive dialogue about the sustainability of funding for ICBs and the significance of ensuring strong oversight mechanisms to protect patient safety. It emphasizes the risk of fragmented care if ICBs struggle to fulfill their responsibilities due to budget cuts and urges policymakers to consider the long-term repercussions on health services and patient welfare.
In conclusion, the proposed ICB cuts pose a considerable threat to the current efforts in maintaining uniform patient safety standards and addressing the healthcare needs of diverse populations across the country, necessitating immediate attention from health authorities.
Full article here.
One in 10 mental health patients who attended A&E in England last month stayed for more than 24 hours – and this figure rose to more than one in three in some departments, new data suggests.
NHSE labelled the data as “experimental”, because no quality checks were performed after it was received. However, they are the first official figures on the size of this long-standing problem.
In total, 173 acute hospital sites with a major type 1 or specialist type 2 A&E recorded attendances of mental health patients, and 118 of these recorded stays of 24 hours.
Read full article (paywalled).
Source: Health Service Journal, 14 November 2025
Doctors have developed an AI tool that could reduce wasted efforts to transplant organs by 60%.
Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor, and more candidates are stuck on waiting lists than there are available organs.
Recently, in cases where people need a liver transplant, access has been expanded by using donors who die after cardiac arrest. However, in about half of these donations after circulatory death (DCD) cases, the transplant ends up being cancelled.
That is because the time between the removal of life support and death must not exceed 45 minutes. If the donor does not die within the timeframe needed to preserve organ quality, surgeons often reject the liver because of the increased risk of complications to the recipient.
Now doctors, scientists and researchers at Stanford University have developed a machine learning model that predicts whether a donor is likely to die within the timeframe during which their organs are viable for transplantation.
The AI tool outperformed the judgment of top surgeons and reduced the rate of futile procurements – which occur when transplant preparations have begun but the donor dies too late – by 60%.
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Source: The Guardian (13 November 2025)
Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust will establish a Secure Data Environment (SDE) for mental health research to improve understanding of mental health conditions and treatments.
The trust is working in partnership with the University of Liverpool through the Merseyside-based Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC) and has received more than £2.7 million funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
The funding allows Mersey Care to work with DATAMIND, the UK’s national data infrastructure for mental health research, to establish a SDE for NIHR’s Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC).
The secure data platform will receive, store and analyse patient data from the MH-TRC, and support linkage of MH-TRC data with other health-related datasets such as the NHS SDE networks (regional NHS research hubs), making it easier for researchers to access data to better understand mental health conditions and improve treatments.
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Source: Digital Health (13 November 2025)
Thousands of resident doctors have begun strike action across England in a dispute over pay.
The five-day action, which began at 7am on Friday, is the 13th walkout by doctors since March 2023 and health leaders have warned that the NHS may have to cut frontline staff and offer fewer appointments and operations if the strikes continue.
The NHS Confederation and NHS Providers, which represent health trusts, said continued action was piling pressure on already-stretched budgets. The last industrial action in July was estimated to have cost the health service £300m.
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Source: The Guardian (14 November 2025)
The NHS waiting list in England has fallen after three months of consecutive rises.
At the end of September, it stood at 7.39 million, down from 7.41 million the month before. Of those waiting, 61.8% of patients had been waiting less than 18 weeks.
That is the best performance for more than two years, but is well below the target of 92%, which the government has promised it will hit by the end of the parliament.
The NHS also released figures showing more than one million people came forward for flu jabs in the past week after a vaccination "SOS" was issued last week amid the early rise in flu cases this year.
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Source: BBC News, 13 November 2025
The number of deaths linked to superbugs that do not respond to frontline antibiotics increased by 17% in England last year, according to official figures that raise concerns about the ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance.
The figures, released by the UK Health Security Agency, also revealed a large rise in private prescriptions for antibiotics, with 22% dispensed through the private sector in 2024.
The increase in private prescribing is partly explained by the Pharmacy First scheme, a flagship policy of Rishi Sunak’s government that allows patients to be prescribed antibiotics for common illnesses without seeing a GP, raising questions about whether the shift in prescribing patterns risks contributing to the rise in resistance.
“Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest health threats we face,” said the UKHSA’s chief executive, Prof Susan Hopkins. “More people than ever are acquiring infections that cannot be effectively treated by antibiotics. This puts them at greater risk of serious illness and even death, with our poorest communities hit the hardest.”
The emergence of drug-resistant strains is an inevitable consequence of natural selection. Whenever the drugs are used they wipe out some bugs, but any survivors multiply and are transmitted.
Limiting the use of antibiotics to when they are most needed is one of the most effective ways of combatting the spread of resistance, which it has been predicted could cause as many as 10 million deaths a year globally by 2050.
The latest surveillance data found that the number of antibiotic-resistant infections in 2024 equated to an average of nearly 400 newly reported cases a week.
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Source: The Guardian, 13 November 2025
Dozens of patients were put at risk after two of the UK's leading transplant centres continued fitting a heart device - despite knowing of concerns it had a higher mortality rate than its rival product.
Concerns were raised by the NHS about the device in 2018. Of the patients who were subsequently fitted with the mechanical pump, half went on to die within three years.
LVADs have been life-savers for decades and, for a number of years, hospitals had a choice of two devices - the HeartWare HVAD, sold by the Irish-American company Medtronic, and the Heartmate III, sold by US manufacturer Abbott.
In October 2018, NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), which oversees transplants in the UK, conducted a preliminary audit comparing how the two pumps had performed. A more detailed analysis followed in April 2019.
The results were stark. Of the 119 patients who had received the Medtronic device, 45% - or 54 patients - had died within two years. In contrast, just 15% - 15 out of 97 patients - who were given the Abbott pump had died over the same period. Similarly, the number of complications - such as strokes or needing a new pump - were significantly higher for the Medtronic device. The audit said there were "no significant differences" between the types of patients who received each device.
One of the UK's six transplant centres, the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, did not wait for the NHS analysis. It had picked up on the growing international concerns and had stopped using the Medtronic device in February 2018 "after considering the results of two randomised controlled trials", as their clinicians "considered the Heartmate III as superior".
However, Harefield Hospital continued to solely use the Medtronic device until early 2021, shortly after the manufacturer had issued a safety notice. The Freeman Hospital continued until June 2021, when the manufacturer withdrew it from sale "in the interest of patient safety".
The regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), continued to approve the device for use after the 2019 analysis, though it had not been informed by the NHS of the data's existence.
Read full article.
Source: BBC News, 12 November 2025
The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) will remove broad “black box” warning labels from hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause.
The action, announced Monday, follows a comprehensive review of scientific literature by an expert panel at the agency in July, officials said, as well as a public comment period. Manufacturers are now expected to update and reprint their product labeling to remove references to risks of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and probable dementia.
“The label was designed to frighten women and to silence doctors,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on stage during the announcement on Monday morning. “The consequences have been devastating.”
The FDA will not remove the boxed warning for endometrial cancer for systemic estrogen-only products. Its labeled recommendation will be to start HRT within 10 years of menopause onset or before 60 years of age for systemic HRT.
Use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) plummeted quickly after a flawed, now infamous 2002 study. While the study found a small increased risk of breast cancer among participants using HRT, described as less than a tenth of 1% per year for an individual woman, critics say its results were widely misinterpreted and blown out of proportion. A 2024 study found that only 5% of American women use HRT for menopause.
About 80% of women experience menopause symptoms that can last years, yet research has found women who initiate HRT before the age of 60 have a reduction in all-cause mortality. HRT may also reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 50%; Alzheimer’s disease by 35%; bone fractures by up to 60%, according to figures an HHS press release cited.
Echoing Kennedy, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary blamed the study and “medical group-think” for creating “a fear machine that still lingers.” No clinical trial has ever shown that HRT increases the risk of breast cancer mortality, said Makary, who was previously a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins.
“How could the medical establishment get it so wrong for so long?” Makary questioned. “Women deserve the same rigorous science as do men.”
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Source: Fierce Healthcare, 10 November 2025
Leading children’s doctors are urging parents to get their children the flu nasal spray, amid fears of a particularly severe flu season.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) stressed that even healthy children can become seriously ill.
This advice comes as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) confirms this year’s flu vaccine provides "strong protection".
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Source: Independent, 12 November 2025
A mental health trust has been fined £565,000 over the death of a 22-year-old, a figure reduced because the judge took into account the “parlous state” of its finances.
North East London Foundation Trust was yesterday instructed to make the payment for failing to ensure the health and safety of non-employees.
The trust was found guilty in June following the joint longest jury deliberation in English legal history, and a lengthy trial.
The charges relate to the death by suicide of mental health inpatient Alice Figueiredo, who died on a NELFT ward in 2015. The trust, and one of its ward managers, were found not guilty of greater charges of manslaughter.
Read full story (paywalled)
Source: HSJ, 11 November 2025
An elderly man died after falling off a hospital trolley when he had been left alone despite needing one-to-one care.
Harry Dickinson was taken to Chorley and South Ribble District Hospital on December 18 last year. Harry, a retired farmer, was on blood thinning medication and was bleeding from his mouth which led to staff at Springfield Nursing Home arranging for him to go to A&E.
The following morning, while Harry was unattended, he became increasingly agitated and fell off his trolley. The 90-year-old suffered a traumatic intracranial haemorrhage and died on December 20.
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Source: LancsLive, 11 November 2025
Thousands of job cuts at the NHS will go ahead after the £1bn needed to fund the redundancies was approved by the Treasury.
The government had already announced its intention to slash the headcount across both NHS England and the Department of Health by around 18,000 administrative staff and managers, including on local health boards.
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Source: Sky News, 12 November 2025
Canada is no longer measles-free because of ongoing outbreaks, international health experts said on Monday, as childhood vaccination rates fall and the highly contagious virus spreads across North and South America.
The loss of the country’s measles elimination status comes more than a year after the highly contagious virus started spreading.
Canada has logged 5,138 measles cases this year and two deaths. Both were babies who were exposed to the measles virus in the womb and born prematurely.
Measles elimination is a symbolic designation, but it represents a hard-won battle against the infectious disease. It is earned when a country shows it stopped continuous spread of the virus within local communities, though occasional cases might still pop up from travel.
It is prevented by a vaccine administered routinely and safely to children around the world.
“It’s a deeply disheartening development. It’s a deeply worrisome development. And, frankly, it’s an embarrassing development,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Brown University infectious disease expert. “No country with the amount of resources of Canada – or other countries in North America even – should lose their measles elimination status.”
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Source: The Guardian, 11 November 2025
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