Latest news with #LordDarzi
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on alcohol and public health: the drinks industry must not control the narrative
When the government's 10-year health plan is published in July, prevention is expected to get a promotion. This won't be the first time that ministers will have stressed the importance of healthy lifestyles. But nine months after Wes Streeting announced that a shift from treatment to prevention would be one of the principles governing Labour's stewardship of the NHS, we are just a few weeks away from knowing how the idea will be put into practice, and turned into a narrative for voters. In recent years, obesity has dominated discussions of the rising burden of chronic illness. But alcohol, too, is expected to feature in sections of the plan dealing with public health. Alcohol-related deaths in the UK reached a record high of 10,473 in 2023, with men more than twice as likely to die as women, and over-55s drinking far more than younger adults. The highest death rates are in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In his review of the crisis facing the NHS, Lord Darzi highlighted that the rise in deaths in England coincided with alcohol's increasing affordability. By contrast, in Scotland, research suggests – though it does not definitively prove – that the introduction of minimum unit pricing has led to fewer deaths and hospitalisations. Pressure for a tougher approach from policymakers to alcohol is also growing internationally. Two years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) made a public statement that there is no safe amount of alcohol. Last month, in Amsterdam, a new European Health Alliance on Alcohol was launched. It plans to campaign for the reduction of alcohol-related injuries and illnesses. Later this year, a UN general assembly meeting on non-communicable diseases is expected to include discussion of alcohol-related illness. If governments decide to act in response to such pressure, the options open to them include minimum pricing, taxes, advertising restrictions and stricter guidelines (in the UK, adults are recommended not to exceed 14 units a week, while pregnant women are advised not to drink at all). Other public health interventions include specialist clinics and other local services for those who are already addicted or ill. Before last year's election, Labour ruled out minimum unit pricing in England, although this was introduced by a Labour administration in Wales. If this decision has not already been reviewed in connection with the 10-year health plan, then it should be. But lobbyists will ensure that this and other challenges to the industry won't be easy. Last month, the Guardian reported on how new restrictions on ultra-processed foods were watered down under pressure from the Food and Drink Federation. While the guidance to retailers was softened under the last government, these changes have not been reversed by Labour. Unsurprisingly, a government that has staked its reputation on economic growth is a good listener to businesses. Rules and regulations are not the only factor shaping habits and behaviour. The drinks industry is also pushing back with advertising campaigns that reach over politicians' heads and seek to influence the public directly. Central to these efforts is a message that moderate drinking is not harmful. While this is in direct contradiction to the WHO's stance, it may appeal to a public that enjoys drinking. Ministers must ensure that accurate information about risks is out there, too, and that government decisions are guided by health, not lobbying.
The Independent
19-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Mental health reforms ‘mark vital step' in improving care quality
The Government's attempts to modernise mental health legislation will 'not solve every problem' but mark a 'vital step' in improving quality of care, according to Wes Streeting. The Health Secretary said attitudes to mental health have 'come on leaps and bounds' since the Mental Health Act 1983 before warning that the law has been 'frozen in time'. Patients would be given a greater say over their care and treatment under the terms of the Mental Health Bill tabled in Parliament. Other changes include ensuring that detention and compulsory treatment are only undertaken when necessary, with provision for more frequent reviews and appeals, and limiting the time people with autism or a learning disability can be detained. The Bill has already been scrutinised in the House of Lords and it cleared its first hurdle in the Commons on Monday evening, when MPs approved it at second reading. Mr Streeting told MPs: 'The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. When it comes to the treatment of people with serious mental illness, we are falling well short of the humane, compassionate society we aspire to be. 'Patients live 15 to 20 years shorter lives than the average. They are often accommodated far away from their family and loved ones. 'The facilities they are housed in can be completely unsuitable. Lord Darzi found during his investigation last year nearly 20 patients in a mental health facility forced to share two showers and live amongst an infestation of rats and cockroaches. 'Patients are denied the basic choice and agency that is awarded to NHS patients with physical illnesses. People from ethnic minority communities, and especially black African and Caribbean men, are more than three times as likely to be sectioned. 'Although they are very different conditions, people with a learning disability or autistic people are often lumped in with those who have mental illness – reflecting an outdated lack of medical understanding.' Mr Streeting added: 'While attitudes to mental health have come on leaps and bounds in the past four decades, the law has been frozen in time. 'As a result, the current legislation fails to give patients adequate dignity, voice and agency in their care. 'This is despite the fact that patients themselves have consistently told us that being treated humanely and making decisions about their own care plays a vital role in their recovery. 'When patients are detained and treated without any say over what is happening to them, it can have serious consequences for their ongoing health.' Mr Streeting went on: 'This Bill does not solve every problem in our mental health services, but it marks a vital step in our plans to improve the quality of care, combat long-standing inequalities and bring about a stronger focus on prevention and early intervention in mental health.' Mr Streeting said mental health professionals will 'have to consider the risk of serious harm when making decisions to detain' which will ensure 'any risks to the public and patients are considered as part of the assessment process'. He said: 'The vast majority of people with mental illness, including severe mental illness, present no risk to themselves or others and for the majority of people, treatment can be provided without compulsion. 'However, there are some people whose illness, when acutely unwell, can make them a risk to themselves and sometimes to others. 'No one knows this better than the families of Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber or Grace O'Malley Kumar, the victims of Valdo Calocane's violent rampage in Nottingham, whose campaign for justice and accountability has been truly awe inspiring, or indeed the family of Valdo Calocane, who I have also spent time with listening to their experience of feeling badly let down by health services. 'As the independent investigation into the murders found, both he and his victims were failed by the health service, and the families are left to live through the consequences in a level of pain the rest of us could scarcely imagine.' Shadow health secretary Ed Argar welcomed the Bill, saying it's 'not only important but right that our laws are updated to reflect the modern world and the knowledge we have today'. He said: 'I believe it is right that we took the time to get this right. That work updating the Mental Health Act started under the previous government, and we had a commitment in our election manifesto to update the laws in this area, and that is something that has been carried on by the new government, and we continue to believe this is the right thing to do. 'So I want to put on record our in principle, support for the Government in this legislation.' He told MPs the Conservative 'welcome efforts to improve the patient's voice involvement in their own care' through 'greater use of advanced choice documents'. The Bill will undergo further scrutiny at a later date.
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
The NHS needs a complete change of culture to deal with medical mistakes
The National Health Service needs a completely new approach to patient safety. Once again, the public accounts committee, one of the oldest committees of MPs, has proved its value in identifying a problem of the wasteful spending of taxpayers' money. As usual, however, the committee is better at describing the problem than in coming up with a solution. The problem is that the NHS spends far too much on compensation for medical mistakes. The public accounts committee says: 'An astounding £58.2bn has been set aside to cover the potential cost of clinical negligence events in the latest accounts – the second largest liability across government after nuclear decommissioning.' This is a dramatic way of stating the problem, although the £58.2bn figure is perhaps not the most useful one. It is not money that is actually 'set aside': it is simply a way of estimating future claims for long-term planning purposes. What matters is the amount that is actually spent each year on clinical negligence claims: this was £2.8bn in the financial year 2023-24. That is nearly 2 per cent of annual NHS spending. It means that for every £50 spent on the NHS, it pays £1 to compensate patients or the families of patients for injuring them or killing them rather than making them better. This is unacceptable. Lord Darzi, the doctor and Labour former minister who reviewed the NHS for the incoming government last year, said it is twice the share of health spending paid in negligence claims in New Zealand, 10 times that in Australia and 20 times that in Canada. This is why the public accounts committee says that 'huge improvements still need to be made to better protect both patients and public money'. As the committee says, 'behind these jaw-dropping figures lie many tragic incidents of patient harm'. Each case of compensation is a family's emotional trauma, a case of illness misdiagnosed or not spotted at all, or of treatment gone wrong, sometimes with fatal or life-changing consequences. Year after year, well-meaning attempts have been made to get to grips with the problem. Jeremy Hunt – the long-serving health secretary in the Conservative government – to his great credit made patient safety one of his personal missions. He has even written a book about it, Zero: Eliminating unnecessary deaths in a post-pandemic NHS. Mr Hunt achieved some useful reforms, for example changing the remit of the NHS Litigation Authority, now called NHS Resolution, so that it focuses on trying to resolve claims of negligence without going to court. But that does not deal with the underlying cause of the problem, which is why medical mistakes are made in the first place. This is where the entire NHS needs a change of culture. It needs to adopt an airline safety approach, which is to say that every mistake should be investigated in a no-blame environment where the only things that matter are learning the lessons and improving protocols to make specific errors less likely in future. This may be hard for the general public to accept, because the usual demand whenever anything goes seriously wrong is for a public inquiry, often with the explicit purpose of apportioning blame – and often with the implicit assumption that those so blamed must go to prison. These attitudes lead to a climate of fear and therefore a tendency to cover up mistakes and an institutional defensiveness that prevents lessons being learned. The Independent has seen this pattern repeat itself time and again in public services in general, but in the NHS in particular – above all in specialisms such as maternity care. This is a huge challenge for Wes Streeting, the current health secretary, who has made a brave start on the equally daunting task of clearing the coronavirus backlogs. But if the change cannot be achieved within the NHS in its current form, then other models of healthcare must be considered instead. The issue is too serious for sentimentality about the NHS, which Nigel Lawson, the chancellor in the 1980s, called the 'national religion', to get in the way.
Sky News
08-05-2025
- Health
- Sky News
Cost of digitising the NHS £21bn over the next five years
The cost of digitising the NHS is around £21bn over the next five years, according to new research. A report from the Health Foundation has analysed the cost needed to put in the infrastructure for digital patient records, cloud storage, cyber security and Wi-Fi, as well as the cost of the skills and capabilities to use it effectively. Debates around digitising the NHS often centre on the hardware and infrastructure, but the Health Foundation has highlighted the ongoing costs, including software subscriptions and maintenance. A report in January found some NHS trusts still rely on fax machines, while others "are often still too reliant on paper records". The Health Foundation said "significant investment" will need to be made in the next five years, including £8bn in capital spending, £3bn in one-off spending and £2bn in annual costs. Several attempts to digitise the health service have been made - and subsequently abandoned - over the years due to spiralling costs. A plan to create the world's largest single civilian computer system, linking all parts of the NHS was launched in 2002 and dismantled just over a decade later - despite already costing more than £10bn. The doomed National Programme for IT had been in disarray for several years before the plug was finally pulled. The programme had originally been budgeted at around £6bn. 'Reform or die' The prime minister has previously said the NHS must "reform or die" in the wake of a damning report from Lord Darzi into the state of the health service. The report - ordered by Health Secretary Wes Streeting days after he took on the role - concluded the health service was in "critical condition" with record waiting lists, and the health of the nation significantly deteriorating in the last 15 years. Keir Starmer has previously promised to move from an "analogue to a digital NHS" however, a recent report from the Public Accounts Committee has warned "the switch to digital in parts of the NHS has been glacially slow". 2:35
The Independent
06-03-2025
- Health
- The Independent
William reveals ‘terrifying' first steps as crisis helpline volunteer
The Prince of Wales has revealed his first session as a crisis helpline volunteer for young people was 'terrifying'. William spoke in detail for the first time about his experiences in 2020, saying the conversations had lived with him when he chatted to members of a youth advisory board helping to shape support given to vulnerable teenagers. The future king visited Mental Health Innovations (MHI) in west London, a charity established by William's Royal Foundation, to mark its merger last year with The Mix, a digital youth support charity. Chatting to the board which advises MHI, William said: 'I did volunteering for a bit back over Covid, and some of those conversations lived with me for quite a long time afterwards, and you always say to yourself 'did I give enough, did I do enough, did I find the right answer'?' After training, William volunteered in 2020 with Shout 85258, a round-the-clock text messaging helpline, developed by his Royal Foundation with offers support via text message to people in personal crisis. During the chat William was shown a new website for The Mix that goes live later this year and has been streamlined and made user friendly. He commented: 'The resource thing is really important because when you're in a mental health crisis the last thing you want to do is read more stuff.' The youth advisory team also showed the prince a proposed online tool to help volunteers provide answers to clients and William admitted about his initial session: 'The first one was quite terrifying.' Before ending his conversation with the young board, he told them: 'You guys are going to be the thermometer of the nation.' During the event at White City in west London, William later chatted on a roof terrace with a group of mental health experts, including Professor Lord Darzi, director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London.
