Health Policy InsightHealthcare management online analysis and intelligence
Health Policy InsightPM says supporters of both groups are being misled and a tie-up would be a ‘disaster’ for Britain. This live blog is closed
Downing Street has described the alleged comments by the band Kneecap in the ‘kill MP’ footage (see 12.10pm) as “completely unacceptable”.
At the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson described the comments as “completely unacceptable”.
We do not think individuals expressing those views should be receiving government funding.
That’s up to the group, but clearly the PM rejects the views expressed … does not shy away from condemning them.
I don’t want to see strike action, I don’t think anybody wants to see strike action.
And certainly here we are in a healthcare environment with all the staff working really hard. The last thing they want to do is to go into dispute again.
Continue reading...Trump team’s slashes to US health department threaten popular program that combats elder hunger and isolation
The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.
Continue reading...Report confirms that Arakawa died of hantavirus and her husband, who had heart problems and Alzeimer’s disease, may not have realised she had died
Two months after the actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, final autopsy results on the couple have been released.
These shed further light on the state of health of Hackman, 95, at the time when his and his wife’s bodies, along with that of one of their dogs, were found by a maintenance worker on 26 February. It is believed that Hackman died around a week after his wife, whose cause of death was hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare rodent-borne disease.
Continue reading...About 14% of premature deaths in England attributable to unhealthy food, the most among surveyed countries
Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
Continue reading...Meeting will hear how exposure to verbal abuse leads to biological changes and can make mental ill-health likelier
Being shouted at by their parents reshapes children’s brains and makes them more likely to have mental ill-health and struggle to maintain friendships, MPs will hear on Monday.
Verbal abuse by adults can leave children unable to enjoy pleasure and seeing the world as threatening, experts in child development and mental health will tell a meeting at Westminster.
Continue reading...Spravato, derived from a popular club drug and also known as esketamine, offers hope to tens of thousands of Australians living with chronic mental illness
A medication chemically similar to ketamine will be made cheaper to improve the lives of Australians suffering from treatment-resistant depression.
The drug, which comes in the form of a nasal spray, is a chemical cousin of ketamine, used for decades as a powerful anaesthetic before it was adopted as a party drug in underground rave culture.
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Continue reading...Barbara Altounyan recalls her father’s self-experimentation and invention
My father, Dr Roger Altounyan, discovered Intal (sodium cromoglicate) in the 1960s, at a time when many of his medical colleagues wrote off asthma sufferers as hypochondriacs (Letters, 18 April). He was an asthmatic and a doctor, and was determined to prove them wrong. He conducted experiments on himself and in a secret Cheshire laboratory over 10 years, testing about 500 compounds before finally declaring eureka.
Then he researched how best to dispense his drug into the lungs of patients. Thanks to his time spent behind a propeller as a wartime fighter pilot, he hit on the idea of the Spinhaler.
Continue reading...My fear growing up was gun violence. But a bigger threat to my body may have come from an invisible villain
Everyone experiences a moment that shapes who they are – a moment when childhood innocence is lost, and the burdens and traumas of the world become clearer.
For me, that moment occurred in elementary school when my friend discovered a gun in Denning Park in Englewood, New Jersey. For days, I worried about what might be lurking behind the trees and in the shadows. This anxiety lingered through high school; I even wrote in my local newspaper that “I couldn’t remember anything more frightening for a young girl in elementary school”.
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