Latest news with #DeviSridhar
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The countries that could solve Britain's health crisis, according to a professor
When Devi Sridhar was a child, her father, an oncologist, would show her pictures of cancer patients' blackened hearts, livers and lungs as a warning not to smoke. The slides, projected on the walls of her family home in Miami, were enough to put Sridhar and her four siblings off the habit for good. But their father was diagnosed with lymphoma when Sridhar was 12 years old, despite living a healthy life. She got used to a 'crossroads' of good or bad news at every blood test or screening. When he died, at just 49, Sridhar didn't eat for months. Sridhar left school early, graduated from the University of Miami with a medical degree at 18, and went on to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford for a PhD in anthropology. She became Prof Sridhar in 2014, when she joined the University of Edinburgh and set up its global health governance programme. Prof Sridhar was one of the first experts to warn that Covid was coming to Britain – in January 2020 – and later advised the Scottish government on its Covid strategy, while she went to fitness boot camps in a local park every day and qualified as a personal trainer. And then, one morning, she got a phone call as she rode the bus to work. A routine smear test had come back showing signs of high-risk HPV, and changes to her cervix. It was 'possibly cancer'. At home in Miami, Prof Sridhar would have been staring down the barrel of huge hospital fees and debt. In Britain, extensive NHS waiting lists meant that the changes to her cervix might not be treated quickly enough to prevent their development. In India, where her parents were born, and where there were no routine cervical cancer screenings, perhaps it never would have been caught 'until it was in an advanced stage,' says Prof Sridhar, two years on. There was no date given for a follow-up consultation, so Prof Sridhar phoned local clinics to ask whether there were any cancelled appointments she could attend. Two months later she secured a slot. Her abnormal cells were frozen, she was given an HPV vaccine to boost her immune response, and now she's cancer-free. It turned a fact that she had always known – that our health is always influenced more by the countries we live in than it is by our lifestyles – into a concrete reality. 'You can bubble yourself off individually,' with a good diet, exercise, air purifiers and water filters, 'but at the end of the day, you're all in it together,' Prof Sridhar says. That's the theme of her latest book, How Not to Die (Too Soon): The Lies We've Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us. From her perspective as a global health expert, trying to live for longer is less about changing our own habits and more about realising that 'if I moved to a blue zone, I would probably be doing all the same that people there already do, and I wouldn't be thinking about it,' she explains. Britain 'leads the world in reducing gun violence' and in bringing down smoking rates, but there remains much that we could learn from how things are done elsewhere in the world, says Prof Sridhar. Here is what she knows. The Netherlands is famous for the bike networks that span its cities. It would be easy to think that the Dutch love to cycle as a part of their culture, but bike lanes originally came about in the 1970s. In 1971, a Dutch girl called Simone Langenhoff was killed as she cycled to school, one of 450 children who died in road traffic accidents that year alone. Her father led a campaign to widen access to safe cycle routes. Now, there are 22,000 miles of cycle paths across the country, and by 2015, a quarter of all trips in the country were made by bike. As a result, getting exercise while you travel to work or to see friends is the default. Almost all Dutch people cycle, and 'only 4 per cent of people don't get the recommended daily amount of exercise,' says Prof Sridhar. This makes it the most fit country in the world, in terms of the amount of exercise people get per week on average. We pale in comparison here in Britain, where one in three men and 40 per cent of women are physically inactive. We have cycle lanes in our cities too, but making people want to use them is another issue. 'If you make walking or cycling safe, people will generally choose it, but people don't feel safe if they're too close to vehicles,' says Prof Sridhar. 'For women, it's often about whether a road is well-lit. We need to think through the barriers and how to tackle them, instead of telling people that their concerns aren't valid.' Prof Sridhar points to Paris as a city where Dutch-style changes are well underway. 'When they created physically separate lanes for cycling, not just a little painted path, the number of women cycling went up radically,' she says. Prof Sridhar would like to see the same in Britain, but first we need an attitude shift, she says. All of us around the world are inherently lazy – if we don't have to exercise, then we often won't. She wishes that the messaging from the government was that 'something is better than nothing,' she says. 'Even as a personal trainer, I struggle to get to the gym for an hour some days, but if I can manage a twenty minute walk, I'll do it, because that's much better than nothing at all.' British adults get more than half of their daily calorie intake each day from ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a situation that has been tied to increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer. 'But Britain isn't fatter than people in countries like Japan because we're more stupid, or because we're lazy, or because we don't buy enough diet books,' says Prof Sridhar. It's all about the availability of healthy food – and the habits we learn as we grow up. Prof Sridhar has adapted her own diet to be more similar to what people traditionally eat in Okinawa, a subtropical region of Japan where people are twice as likely to live to 100 as they are in the rest of the country. 'The main carb in the Okinawan diet is sweet potato,' Prof Sridhar says, which is packed with fibre and micronutrients. Then there's the practice of 'only eating until you're 80 per cent full,' as opposed to the culture of 'finishing everything on your plate' that Prof Sridhar (and most of us) grew up with. But even if all of us in Britain knew about its benefits, that wouldn't be enough to keep us healthy. 'If I had a magic wand and could do one thing, it would be to change school meals in Britain, so that at least all kids are getting one really great nutritious meal a day,' Prof Sridhar says. Adolescents in Britain get closer to two thirds of their calorie intake from UPFs, as they're cheaper to mass produce and serve. It's a situation that sets us up to eat badly for life – and shows us how obesity is a nationwide problem, not the fault of individual people. 'We know that eating fruits and vegetables with healthier proteins is more expensive, so there are arguments against subsidising them to be cheaper or changing school meals. But you'll pay either way,' says Prof Sridhar. 'If someone gets Type 2 diabetes at age 19, they'll need support from the NHS for the rest of their life. In the end, they're the same budgets, because it's all taxpayer-funded and supported.' In Britain, life expectancy has been in decline since 2011. In Finland, however, life expectancy has risen by around two years since then for both sexes, and things are only set to get better: by 2070, the average Finnish man should expect to live to 89. Mortality from treatable conditions is lower than the EU average, too. This is a sure sign that Finland has got it right when it comes to healthcare, Prof Sridhar says, as is the fact that cancer survival rates are among the best in Europe. 'When you're diagnosed with cancer, the faster you get access to treatment, the more likely you are to survive. Part of the reason Britain struggles with this is that we can't get treatment within the 60 days, or 30 days, whatever the crucial window is for the particular cancer that you have,' she explains. The big difference is that Finland's health system is built around prevention, says Prof Sridhar. 'With the NHS, we often wait for someone to have a heart attack before we wonder how to save them. Instead, we should look at whether that person knew they were at risk of heart attack. Did they know their blood pressure? Did they know their adiposity levels around their abdomen? It would help if we shifted our thinking and implemented screenings earlier on.' The way to do that is through tax, Prof Sridhar says. 'In Finland, they've done very well to reduce inequality. Capitalism exists, and it's accepted that some people will have nicer lives than others, but there comes a point where you're deemed to have enough. In Britain, there are billionaires and multi-millionaires that pay less tax than an NHS nurse, because of how the system works. We could tax those people properly, and have a healthier society where everyone does better, without putting the onus on normal working people.' Zurich, in Switzerland, is the least polluted city in the world. It wasn't always that way. In 2010, the city's air was badly polluted, a result of traffic as well as wood-burning for heat in the winter. The city committed to lowering its emissions, which meant reducing the amount of journeys people took by car. Here, as in many countries with cleaner air, 'the message has been about connecting diesel and the danger from air pollution to your health and the health of your loved ones, rather than the environment,' says Prof Sridhar. 'Changing your car is really expensive. Helping people to realise that children who breathe polluted air are more likely to have asthma, and will have changes in their brain, makes it easier for them to take action.' Switzerland also has some of the cleanest tap water in the world, along with Germany. In England, we've 'become worse at separating sewage from the water supply,' says Prof Sridhar. When it comes to fixing that, however, we needn't look so far for answers. 'Scotland has some of the cleanest and best-tasting water in the world, while in England, water quality has declined,' says Prof Sridhar. 'The difference is that in Scotland, our water is publicly owned. When things go wrong, we're able to hold water companies accountable, because the shareholders are people who live here. In England, where water is private and the companies are owned by people overseas, that's much harder to do.' Prof Sridhar's Nani, her maternal grandmother, lives in Chennai, a big city in the east of India. At 92, she stays active, eats a simple plant-based diet, and has a good social life. She lives independently and can still get about well. 'She hasn't fought ageing, or tried to look younger,' Prof Sridhar says. Prof Sridhar's grandmother has inspired her to pursue 'functional health' rather than attempting to look a certain way. Doing squats and staying flexible is important 'because one day, those are the things that will help you to go to the bathroom on your own,' she says. 'My grandmother would never in a million years say that she's sporty, and it would be helpful to move away from those categories in Britain too,' says Prof Sridhar. It's another change that could start in schools, where at the moment, 'people can feel that they're un-sporty, so can't participate'. India has its own challenges with getting its population to move more – 'people have often had to work hard and move all of their lives just to get food and water, so why would they move in their leisure time?', Prof Sridhar points out – 'but there are fewer care homes in India as well as in Japan, so someone like my grandmother is able to stay living independently for longer, because you can stay in your community for longer'. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Telegraph
3 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The countries that could solve Britain's health crisis, according to a professor
When Devi Sridhar was a child, her father, an oncologist, would show her pictures of cancer patients' blackened hearts, livers and lungs as a warning not to smoke. The slides, projected on the walls of her family home in Miami, were enough to put Sridhar and her four siblings off the habit for good. But their father was diagnosed with lymphoma when Sridhar was 12 years old, despite living a healthy life. She got used to a 'crossroads' of good or bad news at every blood test or screening. When he died, at just 49, Sridhar didn't eat for months. Sridhar left school early, graduated from the University of Miami with a medical degree at 18, and went on to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford for a PhD in anthropology. She became Prof Sridhar in 2014, when she joined the University of Edinburgh and set up its global health governance programme. Prof Sridhar was one of the first experts to warn that Covid was coming to Britain – in January 2020 – and later advised the Scottish government on its Covid strategy, while she went to fitness boot camps in a local park every day and qualified as a personal trainer. And then, one morning, she got a phone call as she rode the bus to work. A routine smear test had come back showing signs of high-risk HPV, and changes to her cervix. It was 'possibly cancer'. At home in Miami, Prof Sridhar would have been staring down the barrel of huge hospital fees and debt. In Britain, extensive NHS waiting lists meant that the changes to her cervix might not be treated quickly enough to prevent their development. In India, where her parents were born, and where there were no routine cervical cancer screenings, perhaps it never would have been caught 'until it was in an advanced stage,' says Prof Sridhar, two years on. There was no date given for a follow-up consultation, so Prof Sridhar phoned local clinics to ask whether there were any cancelled appointments she could attend. Two months later she secured a slot. Her abnormal cells were frozen, she was given an HPV vaccine to boost her immune response, and now she's cancer-free. It turned a fact that she had always known – that our health is always influenced more by the countries we live in than it is by our lifestyles – into a concrete reality. 'You can bubble yourself off individually,' with a good diet, exercise, air purifiers and water filters, 'but at the end of the day, you're all in it together,' Prof Sridhar says. That's the theme of her latest book, How Not to Die (Too Soon): The Lies We've Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us. From her perspective as a global health expert, trying to live for longer is less about changing our own habits and more about realising that 'if I moved to a blue zone, I would probably be doing all the same that people there already do, and I wouldn't be thinking about it,' she explains. Britain 'leads the world in reducing gun violence' and in bringing down smoking rates, but there remains much that we could learn from how things are done elsewhere in the world, says Prof Sridhar. Here is what she knows. Exercising like the Dutch The Netherlands is famous for the bike networks that span its cities. It would be easy to think that the Dutch love to cycle as a part of their culture, but bike lanes originally came about in the 1970s. In 1971, a Dutch girl called Simone Langenhoff was killed as she cycled to school, one of 450 children who died in road traffic accidents that year alone. Her father led a campaign to widen access to safe cycle routes. Now, there are 22,000 miles of cycle paths across the country, and by 2015, a quarter of all trips in the country were made by bike. As a result, getting exercise while you travel to work or to see friends is the default. Almost all Dutch people cycle, and 'only 4 per cent of people don't get the recommended daily amount of exercise,' says Prof Sridhar. This makes it the most fit country in the world, in terms of the amount of exercise people get per week on average. We pale in comparison here in Britain, where one in three men and 40 per cent of women are physically inactive. We have cycle lanes in our cities too, but making people want to use them is another issue. 'If you make walking or cycling safe, people will generally choose it, but people don't feel safe if they're too close to vehicles,' says Prof Sridhar. 'For women, it's often about whether a road is well-lit. We need to think through the barriers and how to tackle them, instead of telling people that their concerns aren't valid.' Prof Sridhar points to Paris as a city where Dutch-style changes are well underway. 'When they created physically separate lanes for cycling, not just a little painted path, the number of women cycling went up radically,' she says. Prof Sridhar would like to see the same in Britain, but first we need an attitude shift, she says. All of us around the world are inherently lazy – if we don't have to exercise, then we often won't. She wishes that the messaging from the government was that 'something is better than nothing,' she says. 'Even as a personal trainer, I struggle to get to the gym for an hour some days, but if I can manage a twenty minute walk, I'll do it, because that's much better than nothing at all.' Eating like the Japanese British adults get more than half of their daily calorie intake each day from ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a situation that has been tied to increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer. 'But Britain isn't fatter than people in countries like Japan because we're more stupid, or because we're lazy, or because we don't buy enough diet books,' says Prof Sridhar. It's all about the availability of healthy food – and the habits we learn as we grow up. Prof Sridhar has adapted her own diet to be more similar to what people traditionally eat in Okinawa, a subtropical region of Japan where people are twice as likely to live to 100 as they are in the rest of the country. 'The main carb in the Okinawan diet is sweet potato,' Prof Sridhar says, which is packed with fibre and micronutrients. Then there's the practice of 'only eating until you're 80 per cent full,' as opposed to the culture of 'finishing everything on your plate' that Prof Sridhar (and most of us) grew up with. But even if all of us in Britain knew about its benefits, that wouldn't be enough to keep us healthy. 'If I had a magic wand and could do one thing, it would be to change school meals in Britain, so that at least all kids are getting one really great nutritious meal a day,' Prof Sridhar says. Adolescents in Britain get closer to two thirds of their calorie intake from UPFs, as they're cheaper to mass produce and serve. It's a situation that sets us up to eat badly for life – and shows us how obesity is a nationwide problem, not the fault of individual people. 'We know that eating fruits and vegetables with healthier proteins is more expensive, so there are arguments against subsidising them to be cheaper or changing school meals. But you'll pay either way,' says Prof Sridhar. 'If someone gets Type 2 diabetes at age 19, they'll need support from the NHS for the rest of their life. In the end, they're the same budgets, because it's all taxpayer-funded and supported.' Creating a healthcare system like the Finnish In Britain, life expectancy has been in decline since 2011. In Finland, however, life expectancy has risen by around two years since then for both sexes, and things are only set to get better: by 2070, the average Finnish man should expect to live to 89. Mortality from treatable conditions is lower than the EU average, too. This is a sure sign that Finland has got it right when it comes to healthcare, Prof Sridhar says, as is the fact that cancer survival rates are among the best in Europe. 'When you're diagnosed with cancer, the faster you get access to treatment, the more likely you are to survive. Part of the reason Britain struggles with this is that we can't get treatment within the 60 days, or 30 days, whatever the crucial window is for the particular cancer that you have,' she explains. The big difference is that Finland's health system is built around prevention, says Prof Sridhar. 'With the NHS, we often wait for someone to have a heart attack before we wonder how to save them. Instead, we should look at whether that person knew they were at risk of heart attack. Did they know their blood pressure? Did they know their adiposity levels around their abdomen? It would help if we shifted our thinking and implemented screenings earlier on.' The way to do that is through tax, Prof Sridhar says. 'In Finland, they've done very well to reduce inequality. Capitalism exists, and it's accepted that some people will have nicer lives than others, but there comes a point where you're deemed to have enough. In Britain, there are billionaires and multi-millionaires that pay less tax than an NHS nurse, because of how the system works. We could tax those people properly, and have a healthier society where everyone does better, without putting the onus on normal working people.' Cleaning up our water and air like the Swiss Zurich, in Switzerland, is the least polluted city in the world. It wasn't always that way. In 2010, the city's air was badly polluted, a result of traffic as well as wood-burning for heat in the winter. The city committed to lowering its emissions, which meant reducing the amount of journeys people took by car. Here, as in many countries with cleaner air, 'the message has been about connecting diesel and the danger from air pollution to your health and the health of your loved ones, rather than the environment,' says Prof Sridhar. 'Changing your car is really expensive. Helping people to realise that children who breathe polluted air are more likely to have asthma, and will have changes in their brain, makes it easier for them to take action.' Switzerland also has some of the cleanest tap water in the world, along with Germany. In England, we've 'become worse at separating sewage from the water supply,' says Prof Sridhar. When it comes to fixing that, however, we needn't look so far for answers. 'Scotland has some of the cleanest and best-tasting water in the world, while in England, water quality has declined,' says Prof Sridhar. 'The difference is that in Scotland, our water is publicly owned. When things go wrong, we're able to hold water companies accountable, because the shareholders are people who live here. In England, where water is private and the companies are owned by people overseas, that's much harder to do.' Ageing well like India Prof Sridhar's Nani, her maternal grandmother, lives in Chennai, a big city in the east of India. At 92, she stays active, eats a simple plant-based diet, and has a good social life. She lives independently and can still get about well. 'She hasn't fought ageing, or tried to look younger,' Prof Sridhar says. Prof Sridhar's grandmother has inspired her to pursue 'functional health' rather than attempting to look a certain way. Doing squats and staying flexible is important 'because one day, those are the things that will help you to go to the bathroom on your own,' she says. 'My grandmother would never in a million years say that she's sporty, and it would be helpful to move away from those categories in Britain too,' says Prof Sridhar. It's another change that could start in schools, where at the moment, 'people can feel that they're un-sporty, so can't participate'. India has its own challenges with getting its population to move more – 'people have often had to work hard and move all of their lives just to get food and water, so why would they move in their leisure time?', Prof Sridhar points out – 'but there are fewer care homes in India as well as in Japan, so someone like my grandmother is able to stay living independently for longer, because you can stay in your community for longer'.
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Health
- Scotsman
How Not To Die (Too Soon) by Devi Sridhar review: 'a manifesto of sorts'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Here's the quick answer to the question posed in the title of this book by Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh and advisor to the Scottish and UK Governments, as well as the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and UNESCO: be the kind of person who buys hardback books and has £22 of disposable income (≈24% of the weekly Job Seeker's Allowance). That is not supposed to be flippant, as one of the insistent points in Sridhar's work is the connection between poverty and ill-health. Professor Devi Sridhar The subtitle makes clear another two aspects: 'The Lies We've Been Sold and The Policies That Can Save Us'. Whenever there is a health problem, there are quacks, mountebanks and charlatans. It's unsurprising that in Delhi, for example, there are expensive air-purifiers for sale. But hats off to Moritz Krähenmann, selling eight litre cans of Swiss Alpine air for £17.60 – we breathe, Sridhar notes, six litres a minute. The second part is trickier. Although there are aspects of our lives that we can control, and which have tangible health benefits, others are beyond the capability of the individual. Good luck solving carcinogenic car fumes, 100˚F summers or rivers full of excrement and chemical run-off on your own. (For the record, climate change is not one of the emergencies Sridhar covers). Politics and the bogey-man word 'regulation' are, unfortunately, the answers sometimes. The title may have a slight after-tang of self-help, but the book itself is more concerned with state-level intervention. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The chapters cover what Sridhar calls a 'collective endeavour' to increase life expectancy; although the caveat here is on the quality not the duration of life. The first three chapters, uncontentiously enough, cover taking regular exercise, eating a balanced diet and either not taking up or giving up smoking. Then comes a chapter broadly on mental health. This chapter is more sketchy. It limits itself to anxiety disorders – 'struggling' seems as apt a word as any. There is one flash of really smart writing, when Sridhar having discussed the accusation that 'Sustainable Development Goals' in mental health are 'senseless, dreamy and garbled' writes the criteria were 'mostly vague, largely immeasurable, somewhat attainable, and definitely relevant'. Although one section is headed 'It's hard to get depression taken seriously' it's hard to take seriously when she quotes 'even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise' – it might be Victor Hugo, but it sounds like Hallmark. The next sections are more obviously public: gun control, road traffic accidents, water and air pollution; and an appropriate closure on untimely deaths caused by failures of health systems themselves. I was surprised – given Sridhar is based in Scotland – that neither alcohol nor narcotics were given special treatment, especially since minimum pricing and the recent experiment with safe drug consumption facilities. In the governmental rather than individual, it seems strange to omit warfare: as we see increasingly, it is not just cluster bombs and land mines that significantly reduce life expectancy in conflict zones but the deliberate use of food blockades, targeting of medical facilities and 'kettling' populations. Sometimes the book reads like various articles stitched together (there is a curious point in the nicotine chapter where she cites that the cheapest packet of cigarettes in the UK was £8.82 – in 2017. Would it have been too much trouble to put in that the average is now £16.60? It is at its best when it might have been subtitled 'Things Are More Complicated Than You Think'. For example, a whole book might have been done on Thailand and Sweden: Thailand has the world's worst road deaths, but managed to clamp down with sufficient rigour to have minimal Covid deaths. Sweden has strict 'Vision Zero' road safety but was laissez-faire (or cavalier, take your pick) about liberties during the pandemic, with many more deaths. Sridhar ends with a manifesto of sorts. Change is possible (for the better, I should add), it happens when there is consensus (see the difference between smoking bans and ultra low-emission zone), we can all learn from other countries, even when what we learn is that risks balance out, and the 'private sector is valuable… while it's sometimes the solution, its also sometimes part of the problem', which is gold-star fence sitting. She also has five 'asks' of government: make fresh food cheaper, provide alternatives to cars, privatise water companies, and invest in preventative medicine. I'd like to know quite how this gels with the private sector's role. One other recommendation seems to me plain wrong: 'provide local access to lay therapists, which takes mental health provision out of medical clinics'. Although I very much agree with Suzanne O'Sullivan on over-diagnosis, the benefits of therapy and non-material causes for genuine and painful material harms, the idea of outsourcing something so significant to unregistered amateurs seems ill-considered. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The plethora of contemporary references – Khloé Kardashian, Andy Murray, Catherine Princess of Wales, Feargal Sharkey – bolsters the sense this is in part a laudable exercise in recycling comment pieces. No doubt it will also strengthen the public engagement section for Edinburgh University in the next round of the Higher Education Research Excellence Framework.
Daily Mail
18-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Covid guru Devi: How my fight for NHS cancer care laid bare Scotland's waiting list crisis
A public health expert who advised the Scottish and UK governments has revealed how her own battle to access cancer treatment exposed chronic failures within the NHS. Professor Devi Sridhar became a leading voice during the pandemic, when she counselled Nicola Sturgeon on the SNP 's COVID response and made regular appearances on television shows like Good Morning Britain and Channel 4 News. But despite her significant expertise and government influence, the Oxford-educated academic was told she could face a six-month wait to learn whether the abnormal cells discovered in a smear test were cancerous. Ms Sridhar said: 'I was calling three to four times a day to see if anything was available, saying I could come any time. 'It was scary and it was frustrating because I teach this stuff, right? So I know there's delays in the system and I also know the statistics on treatments. Each day I move forward [before] being treated, my chance goes down by 2 per cent.' Like 280,000 other Scottish women each year, Sridhar had undergone a routine test to detect signs of HPV, a group of viruses responsible for 95 per cent of cervical cancer cases. The health expert was shocked to receive a call explaining that 'possibly cancer' was present – but even less prepared for the prognosis of indefinite delays and administrative chaos that accompanied it. Sridhar repeatedly begged for a date for a follow-up consultation, but was left 'waiting on a letter from the system where you're just a data point'. Having lost her own father to cancer when he was just 49, the prospect of facing lengthy delays while simply hoping for the best was particularly galling. She told The Sunday Times: 'Everyone did say, 'he's gonna be alright'. And he wasn't,' Although the professor is sympathetic to the pressures on NHS staff, she admits that her struggle to beat the backlog reveals the extent of the crisis facing the health service. She added: 'We're not meeting the targets for even those with an active cancer diagnosis … and that is why our survival outcomes are not as good as other countries.' Ultimately, Ms Sridhar's persistence paid off and she was given a cancelled appointment slot after two months. The abnormal cells were frozen to stop them from growing and Sridhar also received the HPV vaccine to increase her immune system's response to the virus. But she advises that her own experience demonstrates how 'you have to be an active participant in your patient journey' to access timely care – a daunting challenge for those without the academic's medical expertise. The warning comes after Public Health Scotland revealed that more than a quarter of patients referred with urgent suspicion of cancer are waiting longer than the 62-day target for their first treatment. Cancer Research UK's public affairs manager in Scotland, Dr Sorcha Hume, criticised the waiting times as 'completely unacceptable'. She said: 'NHS staff are doing their best but they're battling against under-investment alongside rising cancer cases. 'If we're to turn the tide on the anxiety faced by so many, we need to see adequate funding for staff and equipment. 'Innovative reform and rapid progress against Scotland's cancer strategy is also essential.' While Ms Sridhar credits the NHS screening programme with protecting her health, she echoed CRUK's call for increased investment in public health initiatives. She said: 'I don't understand sometimes why we think we're saving money by pulling back from screening programmes, prevention programmes, intervention programmes, when it ends up costing us more in the end.'
Times
18-05-2025
- Health
- Times
I was writing about how not to die — then cancer came
When she was writing a book called How Not to Die (Too Soon), the public health expert Professor Devi Sridhar received a shock phone call. Abnormal cells had been found during a routine smear test and, just as she was describing how to increase your chances of living to 100, she faced the prospect of her own death. 'That would have been the greatest irony, to die before the book comes out,' she says, remembering the call which came through while she was commuting to work across the Scottish capital on a bus. Sridhar, 40, holds a chair in global public health at Edinburgh University. Now the pages of her new guide to longevity — due to be published by Penguin on June 12
