The absurdity at the heart of the junior doctors’ strikes
Immediately after the Easter weekend, junior doctors are planning a six-day strike. Unless they call it off, Starmer has said…
NHS Online won’t cure Britain’s creaking healthcare system
What is it that doctors actually do? The answer is not obvious, and I say that as a physician who…
Should teenagers be vaccinated against meningitis B?
Two people have died of meningitis in Kent: an eighteen year old year 13 student named as Juliette, and an…
The BBC cannot tax Netflix viewers
The BBC has described itself as being set to enter ‘managed decline’. The government is currently reviewing the broadcaster’s charter,…
Can Wes Streeting get the sick back to work?
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has tried using the NHS for social engineering before. Previously, he’s suggested that weight-loss jabs could…
Is it a surprise middle-class women are using Ozempic most?
New research reveals a startling truth about the people paying thousands for weight-loss drugs: they’re mostly middle-aged, wealthy women. In…
How can measles have broken out in London?
Last month the World Health Organisation removed Britain from its list of countries where measles had been effectively eliminated. The…
Does coffee really lower the risk of dementia?
People who drink coffee and tea are less likely to suffer dementia, according to a large study published this week.…
The new junior doctors’ strikes aren’t about pay
Junior doctors have voted to extend their strikes – by a whisker. Turnout for yesterday’s vote collapsed to less than…
Don’t bet on Elon Musk’s failure
Tesla’s last quarterly report revealed that deliveries had declined for the second year running and, for the first time, annual…
What Lego taught me about my own mediocrity
Lego – I can’t bring myself to capitalise it more than once – was born today in 1958, when it…
Belsen haunted my friend to the grave
A patient, an old woman with white hair, stripped of speech by dementia, followed us each shift, staying an inch…
Labour’s drink-driving law won’t cut road deaths
‘We will tread more lightly on your lives,’ promised Keir Starmer in his first speech as Prime Minister. Yet his…
Christmas and the luxury of fallow time
Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those…
The welcome tyranny of Christmas cheer
In 1946, buoyed by post-War optimism, the World Health Organisation adopted a famous definition. Health, it declared, was more than…
Death at Christmas
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those…
The yearly flu crisis is entirely avoidable
Each winter our NHS is struck by an ‘unprecedented’ number of cases of seasonal illness. Politicians talk gravely of the…
Why are world leaders shocked by the Bondi Beach attack?
Micheál Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach, said he is shocked by the anti-Semitic slaughter on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Ursula von der Leyen,…
How terror triumphed at the Christmas market
Mulled wine and Heckler & Koch assault rifles don’t belong together, except in Christmas films like Die Hard. Festive visitors to…
Is racism to blame for the NHS maternity crisis?
‘Nothing prepared me,’ said Baroness Amos as she released her ‘reflections and initial impressions’ about England’s maternity and neonatal services,…
The joy of receiving Christmas cards – even from people I loathe
These days I barely know what my own handwriting looks like; about my friends, the knowledge is all but lost.…
Why GPs are reluctant about online booking
‘Moaning Minnies’ is how the Health Secretary Wes Streeting has described GPs opposing his rollout of online appointment booking. Originally,…
Junior doctors are striking for the wrong reason
Oh God, another junior doctor strike. That seems to be the feeling of the country and of the junior doctors…
Only radical change can cut NHS waiting lists
A research letter in the Future Healthcare Journal, laying out the scale of performance failings in the NHS, has attracted a…
Junior doctors’ strikes are good for my wallet – but totally avoidable
Until Tuesday, I’m once again working as a junior doctor: trying to remember how to take blood, print labels, and…
