Hospitals
Prue Leith: My plan to get real catering back into hospitals
Picture the scene: we are filming the opening link for The Great British Bake Off. Here I am in the…
Haunting and hallucinatory: hospital poems from Hugo Williams
Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless,…
Is modernist architecture unhealthy?
Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of…
How does anyone manage to navigate the maze of our second-rate NHS?
Next month the National Health Service turns 70. The institution is greatly loved, and not for nothing. The fear of…
Vital signs
Exhibit A. It is 1958 and you are barrelling down a dual carriageway; the 70 mph limit is still eight…
A dispatch from a family of fooshers
I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence…
What I learned while nearly dying
There’s some journalistic research you’d really never do by choice. Spending four days in an NHS hospital with a life-threatening…
The NHS has forgotten the art of a dignified death
I’ve never understood the phrase ‘died peacefully’. Two weeks ago I watched my mother die, in the very same NHS…
Jeremy Hunt is spoiling for a fight. He’s picked the wrong one
It has long been rumoured that when Jeremy Hunt took over as Health Secretary, Cameron told him to do one…
I’m a junior doctor and I used to trust the Tories. Not any more
Like many of my fellow junior doctors, I trusted a Conservative government with the NHS. If it’s to stay strong…
I’m an old hand at cancer. I’ve had it nearly half my life
I remember the exact day my illness first declared itself. Twenty-seven years ago. Thursday 20 October 1988. My then wife…
No, even my daughter’s great hospital care doesn’t change my mind about the NHS
When Girl came off the horse it didn’t look like a bad fall. More like an involuntary and rather hurried…
Customer surveys: just say no
Not long ago, I woke up in hospital, in pain, with a damaged back, but grateful for the sleep that…
Why you have to listen to this year's Reith Lectures
Each year the Reith Lectures come round as Radio 4’s annual assertion of intellectual authority, fulfilling the BBC’s original aspiration…
Is the way our hospitals treat old people down to underfunding – or organised neglect?
I am leaving London soon, coming to the end of my time as a voluntary hospital visitor working from a…
Six rivals for the name Isis
Not in their name The BBC decided to start calling the Islamic terror group Isis by the acronym IS instead.…
Spectator letters: A defence of nursing assistants, a mystery shotgun, and a response to Melanie Phillips
Poor treatment Sir: Jane Kelly’s article (‘No tea or sympathy’, 2 August) on the lack of empathy and emotional support…
In our hard-pressed NHS, must sympathy be rationed too?
Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from…
The NHS ‘wellbeing’ monkey deserves to die
My young daughter has a furry beaver — lifelike in all but its eyes, which to me seem cold and dead.…
When a survivor of Auschwitz asks for your story, what do you say?
My aim as a hospital visitor is to cheer, befriend, have a chat, do something to disrupt the bleak monotony…
Barometer: Storm waves? It could be three times worse
The test of a wave Waves measuring 27ft from peak to trough were seen off Land’s End as the stormy…
Toby Young: It's biological, I become a caveman when my child is sick
The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after…
Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal
One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems…
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