Health Policy InsightHealthcare management online analysis and intelligence
Health Policy InsightExclusive: Transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, says cycling and walking plan focuses on ‘everyday travel needs’
Ministers are to launch a major push to get more children walking and cycling to school as part of a wider boost for “active travel” by the transport secretary Heidi Alexander.
In the first significant change to active travel policy since the Boris Johnson era, thousands of new safe routes and crossings will be built around schools in England, with a target of having at least 60% of all children walk, cycle or wheel to school by 2035.
Continue reading...NHS bosses urge all hospitals in England to use ‘digital triage’ process to combat overcrowding in emergency services
Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service’s usual winter crisis.
Eighteen hospitals in England are already using “digital triage assessment” to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away or be dealt with in another way. If patients do need urgent care they are treated at once in the usual way. But if they have more minor ailments and can wait, they are told to come back later that day or the next day, or are referred to a community-based service, such as a GP or pharmacy.
Continue reading...Outbreak driven by falling vaccination and misinformation as federal public health cuts hamper state response
The US has recorded more than 2,000 confirmed measles cases so far this year – near the total of 2,228 recorded in all of 2025, and on track to become the worst year for measles in decades as states struggle with the loss of federal funding for public health.
The virus continues to spread in unvaccinated and under-vaccinated communities, including among babies too young to be vaccinated, and it reveals the depths of the twin crises of misinformation and public health in the US.
Continue reading...My wife, Rachel Downey, was a health and social affairs journalist who went on to become a communications strategist at the Department of Health. There she worked at the heart of health policy, translating complex and often sensitive issues into communications that the public could understand. It was demanding, important work and she was exceptionally good at it.
Most recently Rachel, who has died of renal failure aged 60, was head of public relations at the Office of the Patient Safety Commissioner. It was a role that felt, in many ways, made for her, as the Office exists to amplify the voices of patients who have been harmed, to hold systems to account and to drive change where it is most needed.
Continue reading...People across the Black diaspora are increasingly turning to weight-loss drugs. How might this reshape our health, wellbeing and body image?
These days, I barely make it through the week without seeing news about what weight-loss medications, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, can now supposedly achieve. Beyond the health benefits of shedding fat, “GLP-1” medications are also touted to treat addiction, and, as reported recently, even lowering the risk of breast cancer. But the extreme weight loss fuelled by these drugs is also reshaping beauty standards.
In this week’s edition, I’m digging into whether Black beauty ideals across the diaspora are under threat from the spread of weight-loss medication. It’s a delicate conversation that I’ve been eager to have for a while.
Continue reading...My sister Liz Martin, who has died aged 73, was a nurse at the Northern General hospital in Sheffield for 46 years, rising to be a ward sister there before her retirement.
She trained at the Northern General as a state enrolled nurse, later moving up to state registered status there and died in the hospital’s palliative care unit after a long struggle with cancer.
Continue reading...Shasta county has one of the state’s highest rates of suicide and gun ownership. Here’s how locals are trying to combat it
Like many men in the mountainous California county of Shasta, about 200 miles north of San Francisco, Bill Rocha loved to hunt and fish, spending the infernal summers out on the lake in his boat. For decades he made his living as a contractor, working hard with his hands every day. And like many men in rural parts of the state, Bill was a gun owner. He had several hunting rifles, some of which he kept locked in a safe, and another firearm that he kept unlocked in his car.
Kelly Rocha, his daughter, described him as extremely sociable, but in private things were starting to fray. She didn’t know the extent of what her father was struggling with until she got a call one night in 2019. She had slept through two voicemails from her father’s wife, but finally picked up when her own mother called. “It was after midnight,” recalled Kelly, who was then 43. “She told me that my dad went out to his truck and killed himself.”
Continue reading...Price of dairy product has risen fivefold after users of GLP-1 medications advised to increase protein consumption
The growing popularity of weight-loss drugs has fuelled global demand for whey protein, sparking concerns among industry experts over a potential shortage.
The price of whey has risen fivefold to record levels as companies race to secure supplies amid a boom driven by growing use of GLP-1 drugs, such as Mounjaro, which often require higher protein intake to preserve muscle mass.
Continue reading...Sharp rise in hospital visits will in turn drive up annual healthcare costs for heat-related conditions to over $1bn
People in the US are poised to endure another summer of unusually ferocious heat and there will be little respite in the years ahead, with a new study finding that the coming 15 years could see a doubling in hospitalizations due to heat-related illnesses.
The number of annual heat-related emergency department visits or hospitalizations across the US are set to rise from about 109,000 cases a year to as many as 237,000 cases by 2040, the new research has estimated.
Continue reading...Medical Protection Society calls for law to be overhauled to help medics avoid liability for errors made by technology
Doctors and the NHS could be sued for medical negligence over mistakes made by artificial intelligence tools used in diagnosing patients and suggesting their treatment, ministers are being warned.
Under the law as it stands, medics and the health service can be held liable for patients being harmed or dying even if it was AI that made the errors that resulted in their suffering.
Continue reading...Backed by a mix of private and public finance, Huddersfield and Manchester are among many in the academic sector helping to create jobs and growth
Huddersfield might appear an unlikely setting for a thriving health research complex. The West Yorkshire town is best known for its manufacturing heritage, but has quickly become a honey pot for private sector businesses keen to collaborate with the town’s university in a push for the latest medical breakthroughs.
Next month, the driving force behind the University of Huddersfield’s national health innovation campus, Prof Liz Towns-Andrews, expects to get the go-ahead for the third of seven planned eco-buildings for research and tech development clustered near the town centre.
Continue reading...Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support
When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.”
The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’”
Continue reading...Readers respond to an article on how early intensive rehabilitation after a stroke or head injury is crucial for recovery
Rather like Ian Sample himself trying to read Orlando Swayne’s book, I was nervous reading his article, braced for half-digested truths or oversimplifications on neurotherapy (The doctor who mends broken brains: why there is room for hope after a stroke or head injury, 3 June). But he paints an accurate picture of the way brains retain neuroplasticity and the reality of the postcode lottery around therapy and rehabilitation services.
I am a speech and language therapist specialising in stroke and neurorehabilitation, and I can attest to what he and Dr Swayne state in the article – that sadly, for some people, the damage caused by neurotrauma cannot be recovered from, but for others, the vital neuroplasticity continues for months and, in some people I have seen, years at a time.
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