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BreakingNews.ie
35 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Northern Ireland to ‘play its part' treating children injured in Gaza
Stormont will 'play its part' in a UK effort to provide medical treatment for children injured in Gaza. The first group of critically ill and injured Gazan children, said to be between 30 and 50 patients, will reportedly be arriving 'in the coming weeks'. Advertisement A very small number, two or three children, are expected to be treated in Northern Ireland. The Executive Office (TEO) has confirmed that First Minister Michelle O'Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly have agreed to a request from Northern Ireland's Health Minister Mike Nesbitt to bring children from Gaza for medical treatment. Sinn Féin, the SDLP, and the Alliance Party have welcomed the move. But TUV leader Jim Allister has expressed concern that those who come could stay. Alliance MLA Paula Bradshaw, who chairs the Executive Office committee, said: 'My priority would be to focus on the children who have got very life-limiting, devastating injuries, and I think that what we have to do is focus on getting them better and improving their prognosis.' Advertisement She told the BBC: 'What happens to them whenever their medical condition is stabilised is for others to decide, but right now we have to play our part in providing that healthcare for those children in most need.' A spokesperson for TEO said: 'The First Minister and the deputy First Minister agreed to the request from the Minister for Health, for Northern Ireland to participate in the UKG (UK Government) scheme to bring children from Gaza to the UK for medical treatment.'
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Henry Marsh: To admit failure as a doctor is incredibly painful, but honesty is what our patients need the most
One afternoon not so long ago, I was cycling home from the hospital when my bike chain snapped. I had been teaching that day – a regular occurrence with a regular route home that, on this particular day, I then had to change. I don't believe in providence, but what happened next was certainly quite the coincidence: I heard my name called and turned around to see Tina, the mother of a patient I had once treated. A patient that I failed. It was the sort of encounter that most doctors might dread. We had first met 29 years prior, when her son, Max, came into my care. He had a brain tumour that I thought was benign and that if I removed it successfully, it wouldn't come back. But after I successfully operated, Max became ill once more. I refused to believe I was wrong – a combination of wishful thinking and denial – so it wasn't until 12 weeks later when I gave the go-ahead for Max to have another scan. The tumour had grown back; it was very aggressive, and it probably shouldn't have been touched in the first place. I should have asked for help, but I was arrogant and believed in myself too much. Max died six days after his fifth birthday. For decades, I had carried the weight of that mistake in silence, one of the many names etched into the private 'inner cemetery', as I call it, that every surgeon carries within themselves. Yet, as we spoke, something unexpected occurred for both of us: relief. Tina told me that her anger for Max's death had, for years, been directed at me; I was able to see her face-to-face to acknowledge what had happened and say the words I needed to, too: I am sorry. That conversation will always stay with me. Because, although it's our patients who suffer most when doctors prove, which they often do, that they are fallible human beings, we too are left to live with the consequences. To admit failure as a doctor is incredibly painful. But honesty is what the medical profession – and our patients – need the most. For most of my career as a neurosurgeon, I wore the mask expected of me: calm, confident, expert. I hadn't always intended to pursue this path – in fact, I dropped out of the University of Oxford, where I was studying philosophy, politics and economics, due to depression. I then worked as a porter at a hospital for a while before settling on studying medicine at University College London. My decision to become a neurosurgeon came when my own son, William, was diagnosed with a brain tumour as a young boy, which was successfully removed. I quickly learnt that operating on the brain requires a strange balancing act. You must be compassionate enough to care, but detached enough to cut. Too much feeling and you cannot function but too little and you risk becoming severe. The technical part of surgery – the incision, the stitching – is the easy part. It's the decision-making and the enormous responsibility for each one that makes surgery difficult. Probabilities cannot be precise: every choice carries risks. It's why everyone in healthcare talks about 'learning from error', but the reality of that is quite different. There's a tendency to see doctors as heroes or villains. And there are a few heroes, like my friend David Nott, who is quite extraordinary – and there are villains, like that surgeon Ian Paterson, who is now in jail. But most of us are in between these two extremes. We're ordinary people. We make mistakes. But when that happens, we survive and the patient does not. That's why I still remember the faces of the patients who I feel I let down. During my 40 years in surgery I achieved quite a bit – pioneering the awake craniotomy (as it sounds – brain surgery while the patient is still awake, in order to allow us to monitor brain function in real-time as we operate), and introducing many modern neurosurgery practices to Ukraine, where I've volunteered for more than 25 years. But really it's only the failures I remember on a day-to-day basis. Not every bad outcome was a mistake, but they haunt me all the same. Still – while I'm remorseful of being somewhat of an absent parent (and grateful that my relationships with my children and grandchildren are now good) – I don't regret my career at all now. And there are achievements I hold dear beyond the operating theatre. The hospital gardens I fought to build outside the neurosurgical wards at St George's Hospital in Tooting, London, where I worked for many years, are one of them. It took seven years of battling contractors and managers to turn an unused balcony into a green refuge, but the result was transformative for patients in my care. The gardens were a step away from ward beds, meaning patients attempting to recover could shuffle outside, feel the air on their faces, listen to the birds and remember they're a person, not a diagnosis in the midst of all that miserable business of being a patient. Medicine is not Michelangelo at his easel, a solitary genius at work. It should be a collective. A good colleague will see your blind spots better than you can, and you can repay the favour It wasn't surgery but it was certainly healing, and an important part of care, rather than treatment – both of which are important. I know that most especially now, since, at 75, I am glimpsing at medicine from the other side of the curtain. I am a patient with prostate cancer. I knew what it was like to some extent – how utterly helpless and vulnerable we are as patients – because of my son William's illness. I knew how much small gestures like smiling or holding a hand matter in that experience, though an awful lot of doctors never realise. But I was actually very annoyed with myself that, when it was my turn to get potentially fatal cancer, I was scared stiff. I was very, very upset: I was a normal human being. Old age and illness, I often remind myself, come for us all. I expected to be more accepting. What of death? I've seen more of it than most, but there's death – which doesn't bother me at all – and then there's dying, which can be unpleasant, even despite good palliative care. Which is why I've been an advocate of assisted dying for many years now, long before I was diagnosed with cancer. I believe more fervently than ever that patients deserve a choice about how they leave the world. We supposedly still have one of the best palliative care systems in the world but the NHS, for all its brilliance, still too often reduces people to cogs on an assembly line. What's missing is honesty. I broke the mould in terms of medical memoir when I wrote my first book, Do No Harm, because to write about error while you are still in the thick of it was, at the time, almost unheard of. My sister once joked that I have always been a 'confession-seeking' nuisance, but I have felt a duty. Medicine has always been built on silence and hierarchy. But junior doctors cannot be expected to speak openly about their mistakes if their seniors pretend they never make them. If we want a better NHS, the obligation of truth falls first on those at the top. Despite all of this, I remain convinced that medicine is one of the most wonderful professions that one could choose. Neurosurgery demanded everything from me, but in return, it gave me purpose, excitement, a sense of privilege. I cannot imagine living a more meaningful life. What have I learned from it? Know your limitations – a lesson that, as my meeting with Tina taught me, I learned too late. Ask for help. Do not believe your own performance of certainty. Medicine is not Michelangelo at his easel, a solitary genius at work. It should be a collective. A good colleague will see your blind spots better than you can, and you can repay the favour. Pretending to be infallible serves no one. Doctors make mistakes; I made mistakes. To admit them is agonising at times, but necessary. Only by telling the truth – to our patients, to each other and to ourselves – can we hope to deserve the trust that is placed on us. 'Confessions of a Brain Surgeon' is on BBC Two and iPlayer from 9pm, 18 Monday August
The Independent
5 hours ago
- The Independent
‘My cancer symptoms were mistaken for signs of menopause – now I'm unable to walk'
A woman has been left unable to walk after her spinal cancer symptoms were mistaken for signs of the menopause and a gardening injury. Karen Davey, 54, from Cornwall, began experiencing hot flushes, fatigue, and loss of appetite in early 2024, but she assumed these were menopause symptoms. But by March 2024, she developed pain in her kidneys and went to visit her GP. However, she was told the back pain was due to gardening, despite having only done 20 minutes of this. Over the next two months, her symptoms worsened and she stopped eating properly, lost weight, and developed a temperature, later losing all sensation in her legs and as well as bladder and bowel function. After being taken to the hospital and admitted for two weeks, she was given the devastating news that she had stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma in her kidneys, and a tumour wrapped around her spinal cord. After one round of radiotherapy and further chemotherapy, she is now in remission. However, she has been left unable to walk and is now a full-time wheelchair user. The 'life-changing' impacts of the cancer have meant she has to reduce her working hours to four a week, while her husband has given up work to be a full-time carer. Ms Davey told the Spinal Injuries Association she felt her symptoms were 'dismissed' by her GP and continued to be dismissed until she was admitted to hospital. She said: 'I'd gone from somebody who was quite active before. I'd do a lot of hiking across the moors, I used to go cold water swimming all year round. One of the last things I did before I got ill was an abseil off a 120-foot viaduct. 'This isn't what I'm supposed to be doing at this time of life. I've not yet been able to get back to driving or anything like that. I'm completely reliant on my husband; it's messed up my social life, just going out to meet friends or going swimming or popping into town to look around the shops. Emotionally, it's just completely messed me up.' Mr Davey said she wanted to spread awareness of her situation and help others who might be experiencing similar symptoms. She said, 'I had no idea that hot flushes would lead to all this. The symptoms you've got aren't always menopause symptoms, and we need to be more mindful of that. 'I just get annoyed that it was attributed to menopause and doing gardening when it needed looking into a bit more. I didn't know anything about spinal cord injury and when my toes started going tingly, it didn't occur to me that that's what it was. There's not enough information.' Spinal Injuries Association supports people living with spinal cord injuries. Dharshana Sridhar, campaigns manager at Spinal Injuries Association, said, 'Karen's story is a powerful reminder that women's health symptoms should never be dismissed or explained away without proper investigation. 'Too often, women with spinal cord injuries face delays in diagnosis and unnecessary barriers to equitable care, leaving them to cope with life-changing consequences that could have been prevented. Across the board, women's concerns are frequently overlooked and when disability or other intersecting factors are involved, the barriers to timely diagnosis and treatment become even greater. Through our women's health campaign, we're calling for better awareness, earlier diagnosis, and accessible healthcare for every woman, no matter her disability."
