How to fix Britain’s ‘sick note’ disease
Alan Milburn, Labour grandee and member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, has said our country’s sick note system…
Can AI really spot heart disease in less than two seconds?
September is here, and the mists and mellow fruitfulness have arrived as promptly as John Keats could have wished. His…
Fixing depressed kids is a near-impossible business
As a young Emergency Department doctor, I developed a spiel for the kids who came in with mental health problems.…
Is the high-street pharmacy in danger?
Only in France have I ever looked forward to attending a pharmacy. Napoleonic Paris, in response to the fatal incompetence…
Why people cared about Jason Arday
Don’t badmouth the dead, said Chilon of Sparta. Over time, the phrase became a positive injunction to say nothing of…
We need more emergency phone alerts
Last night, my phone, which was set to silent, erupted with the sort of siren one associates with immediately life-threatening…
Will the NHS get serious about prescribing weight loss drugs?
‘The weight is over,’ read an advert on the side of a bus outside my hospital this morning. The first…
The NHS is not in a crisis of racism
The Society of Radiographers have said racism is rising in the NHS. They give the example of a patient refusing…
Why I’m ignoring the hosepipe ban – and you should too
I returned from holiday to find parched lawns and a deliciously cool babbling brook where the road had been. Up…
Burnham is wrong to model social care reform on the NHS
There have been trimmings and ornaments: the bus fare cap and the performative opening of a No. 10 North in…
A free-to-use National Care Service will never work
As a former adviser on social care reform to a Conservative prime minister, allow me to explain why Andy Burnham’s…
The NHS is fundamentally dishonest
This weekend, the excellent health editor of the Sunday Times, Shaun Lintern, revealed how NHS England has been suppressing damaging reports…
Why the bus £2 price cap might just pay off for Burnham
Andy Burnham has announced a reduction in the cap on English bus fares, down from Starmer’s £3. Remarkably, he might…
The joyous ridicule of Stella Creasy’s avian error
‘Stella Creasy’s bird-brained parrot alert,’ ran a Steerpike headline yesterday. The Labour MP for Walthamstow had posted a video of…
The NHS can’t cope with this heat
The weather in 1976, like the football ten years before, lingers in our national memory. But already on some measures…
It must be harder for the NHS to strike
The BMA makes lots of vague demands for recognition and autonomy, control and civility – Madeline Grant, hearing similar words…
Would Oxford still open its doors to a poor, white boy like me?
Magdalen College, Oxford, is over-represented at The Spectator. Not long ago, Paul Johnson and Matthew d’Ancona were fixtures here. Today, there…
The true cost of ending the doctors’ strikes
After three years, and a cost to taxpayers of over £3 billion, the junior doctor strikes are finally over. For…
Why Britain has a medicine shortage
Across Britain today, people will take prescriptions to pharmacies and be told they can’t be fulfilled. After hearing a lifetime…
Good intentions alone won’t fix Britain’s maternity crisis
The Ockenden Maternity Review, published today, finds the NHS is not to be trusted – not for maternity care, possibly…
The Employment Rights Act will fuel striking doctors
TThe junior doctors were due to strike again, and everyone was sick of the whole business. At the last minute,…
Why can’t Elon Musk’s critics just be pleased for him?
The quiet kid from my friend’s school has become a trillionaire, and many people are unhappy that this should be…
Marilyn Monroe was just like the rest of us
Marilyn Monroe was born a hundred years ago today. She was famous enough in her lifetime to be one of…
We cannot stop the small boats
This April, we agreed another deal with France to stop migrants coming across the Channel. The Home Office has explained…
Gene-editing drugs are opening a new frontier in medicine
Older readers with bulging medicine cabinets, or parents eyeing their children’s distant futures, are not encouraged to read the New…
