‘Sloven Health’ fined £2m
Today, the Hampshire based NHS trust Southern Health was fined nearly £2,000,000 for health and safety breaches in regard to the preventable deaths of two patients: Connor Sparrowhawk, the “Laughing Boy” of the Justice...
Category: Health
Mental health campaigner Claire Greaves dies in Cygnet unit
I learned this morning that Claire Greaves, a mental health blogger and campaigner who has worked with Mind, Fixers and eating disorder charity Beat until she was moved to a secure unit in 2016,...
Bawa-Garba supporters must stop attacking parents
In a previous post I expressed the opinion that the erasure of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba (right) from the medical register was a miscarriage of justice and that a medical practitioners’ tribunal should not be...
Review: Dispatches, “Inside the Priory”
This documentary on Channel 4 last night (19th Feb) exposed abusive practices, short staff, over-reliance on temporary staff (including the undercover reporter for this programme) and poor safety at a hospital unit, The Dene...
Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, racism and the appeal to authority
Last week the High Court ruled that a doctor whose mistakes contributed to the death of a young boy in 2011 should be erased from the medical register for life. Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba had...
Charities “refusing” Presidents’ Club donations
In light of the revelations about sexual harassment of hostesses at the men-only Presidents’ Club dinner, an annual event for very wealthy men at which expensive prizes (e.g. flash cars, cosmetic surgery, flights in...
Things that don’t mean optional
Earlier last week (before the story about the multiple rapist John Worboys being released from prison) the news was dominated by two stories, one about health and one about transport. The first was that...
Look after your health, and fight for your healthcare
Earlier today Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner who was choked to death by New York police for illegally selling cigarettes in 2014 (one of a series of unarmed Black Americans, mostly men,...
The authority fallacy and the “7-day NHS”
Earlier today, the health minister Jeremy Hunt posted some tweets claiming that Professor Stephen Hawking was wrong in his assessment of the data regarding the “weekend effect” (the notion that people admitted to hospital...
Charlie Gard and NHS versus private care
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has...
Charlie Gard: What if they’re just wrong?
The case of Charlie Gard, the baby boy with a mitochondrial disease and allegedly irreparable brain damage whose life support doctors have been trying to turn off as they believe there is no hope...
NHS compensation is rightful and necessary
Last Monday I saw an article in the *Times* in which a woman called Susanne Cameron-Blackie, who it turns out was the writer behind the now-removed Anna Raccoon blog (see [earlier entry](https://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog/mt.php/2012/11/04/jimmy-savile-at-duncroft-who-to-believe); she was...
Why couldn’t Dean Saunders get a secure hospital place?
Last Friday an inquest jury gave its verdict in the case of Dean Saunders, who killed himself in Chelmsford Prison in January 2016 having been remanded there having injured his father who tried to...
Apricot kernels
Earlier today I was browsing the mentions of Kate Granger, the doctor best known for setting up the “Hello, my name is…” campaign aimed at encouraging doctors, nurses and other health professionals to introduce...
High Valour?
A number of years ago I heard a play on Radio 4 whose title I can’t remember but I suspect it was called *High Valour*. It was about a couple who emigrated to Australia...
Why was Sarah Reed in prison, not hospital?
[Sarah Reed told family of alleged sexual assault in hospital](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/04/sarah-reed-wrote-to-family-she-had-been-sexually-assaulted-in-hospital), from the *Guardian* It has been revealed that Sarah Reed, the woman who was found dead in her cell at Holloway Prison in London...
Fear-free healthcare, revisited
Back in 2012, I published on this site a manifesto of sorts, calling for healthcare in the UK to be free of fear. Back then I was heavily involved in ME activism and three...
Anti-FGM crusade brings out the busybodies
The crusade against FGM is out of control – Spectator Blogs Brendan O’Neill wrote the above article on the incident reported recently in the British press, in which Baroness Jenny Tonge took a flight...
Price tags on medication: why it’s a stupid, callous idea
Yesterday the government announced that labels on drugs prescribed by the NHS in England that cost over £20 will have the cost printed on them along with the words “funded by the UK taxpayer”....
Review: Kids in Crisis
Kids in Crisis was a programme about children with severe mental health problems in the UK who are being transferred a long way from home, sometimes hundreds of miles, because there is no inpatient...