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...
Category: Health
Who’s sorry?
NHS staff told to say 'I am sorry' to patients for medical blunders | Society | The Guardian Recently the health blogosphere and Twitter has been buzzing with talk of NHS managers' and other...
LB on Newsnight while BBC plugs Southern Health unit
So, last night Newsnight did a feature (34min in) on the ongoing ‘effort’ to get people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour out of assessment and treatment units (ATUs), more than two years after...
Online friends, suicide and threats thereof
Recently, two people I know (or knew) on Twitter posted threats to kill themselves. One of them is a woman who has bipolar disorder and has been in hospital on several occasions recently; the...
“Let it not be about lessons learned”
Today the report into the death (PDF) of Connor Sparrowhawk, an 18-year-old who drowned in an NHS learning disability unit in Oxford last July (see earlier entry), was published. That it was published was...
“Awaiting final written permission” (updated)
Update 5:43pm: The report is out. My response is scheduled for publication at 6:30pm GMT. Southern Health: report publication update Southern Health, the NHS trust responsible for the death of Connor Sparrowhawk in one...
Rise in teens admitted to adult psych wards
It was reported today that there has been a rise in the number of teenagers under 18 admitted to adult psychiatric wards, and that these were sometimes hundreds of miles from home and often...
No, it’s not just a sharp scratch
This morning I went for my latest blood test, which I have to have roughly every six months or a year — I can't even remember as I have so many of them —...
The danger of knee-jerk closures of NHS units
A couple of weeks ago, a Care Quality Commission report was published that revealed that two NHS units for people with learning disabilities on the same site in Oxford were dreadful — they failed...
Don’t mind the monkeys
Carers and care workers are the best kind of people. So why are they treated so disgracefully? Yesterday the Guardian published the above article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, best known for co-founding Vagenda magazine...
Young people’s mental health: failed by the system
BBC Three: Failed by the NHS Last night there was a documentary on BBC Three about young people whose mental health conditions went untreated for months or years by the NHS mental health services,...
Why compulsory school dinners are a bad idea
Ban packed lunches, head teachers urged (from BBC News) The government has commissioned a report by two founders of the Leon restaurant chain (!) that says that take-up of school meals is low (43%)...
Review: Don’t Call Me Crazy
Recently a series called Don’t Call Me Crazy, set inside an adolescent mental health unit in Manchester, the now-closed McGuinness Unit, was screened on BBC Three, apparently the first time cameras had been allowed...
Not quite Independence Day
Last week I read about two separate distressing incidents that underline the need for support for people with disabilities to remain living with their families if that is at all possible. The first happened...
Anti-vaxers, ME and desperate people
Recently there has been a major outbreak of measles in South Wales, thought to be largely the result of large numbers of parents not getting their children vaccinated during the MMR scare of 1998....
Ed Balls
Now that I've got your attention … There's currently a measles outbreak in South Wales, the reason for which is that a lot of parents didn't vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine during...
Punish bad nurses, but don’t let the bosses off the hook
Last Wednesday the secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, made a speech at the King’s Fund on “the quality of care”, in which he alleged, among other things, that there had been a...
Nicklinson ruling was the right one
Tony Nicklinson died on the morning of 22nd August 2012, having contracted pneumonia over the weekend. Last week the British High Court ruled that the courts could not allow doctors to end the life...
The Olympics, Ramadan and racism
So, the Olympics has finally started. I had been planning an article last week about the chaos in the preparation for the Games, the security etc., and the traffic disruption that would result from...
A law unto themselves
What do medical staff and airline staff have in common? What separates them is that airline staff do not train for their jobs for five years, yet have the safety of dozens, if not...