Victor Adebowale says failure to detect his mother’s cancer was example of ‘black service, not NHS service’

A senior figure in the health service has criticised it for deep-seated racism after his mother “got a black service, not an NHS service” before she died.

Victor Adebowale, the chair of the NHS Confederation, claimed his mother Grace’s lung cancer went undiagnosed because black people get “disproportionately poor” health service care.

Black British mothers are up to four times more likely to die during pregnancy or within six weeks of giving birth than white mothers.

Those of black and African or Caribbean origin are twice as likely to have a stroke, and younger, than white counterparts.

Black African patients are two and a half times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than white British patients.

The Story of a Heart, which won this year’s award for nonfiction, tells how one child saved the life of another. The author talks about the amazing families involved, campaigning for a better NHS, and how being a doctor frames the way she writes

To read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which has won this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction, is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions. There is awed disbelief at the sheer skill and dedication of the medical teams who transplanted the heart of nine-year-old Keira, who had been killed in a head-on traffic collision, into the body of Max, a little boy facing almost certain death from rapidly deteriorating dilated cardiomyopathy. There is vast admiration for the inexhaustible compassion of the teams who cared for both children and their families, and wonder at the cascade of medical advances, each breakthrough representing determination, inspiration, rigorous work, and careful navigation of newly emerging ethical territory. And most flooring of all is the immense courage of two families, one devastated by the sudden loss of a precious child, the other faced with a diagnosis that threatened to tear their lives apart.

To write such a story requires special preparation. “I was full of trepidation when I first approached Keira’s family,” Clarke tells me the morning after she was awarded the prize. “I knew that I was asking them to entrust me with the most precious thing, their beloved daughter Keira’s story, her memory.” The former journalist trained as a doctor in her late 20s, and has spent most of her medical career working in palliative care. Subsequently, she has also become an acclaimed writer and committed campaigner, publishing three memoirs: Your Life in My Hands, Dear Life and Breathtaking. She turned to her medical training for guidance when writing The Story of a Heart. “I said to myself, my framework will be my medical framework, so I would conduct myself in such a way that they would, I hoped, trust me in the same way that someone might trust me as a doctor. And if at any point they changed their mind, then they could walk away from the project.”

Readers reflect on the hardships faced by younger medics and those training, and the degradation of an entire public service

I write in response to the letter from senior clinicians urging resident doctors to vote against strike action (8 June). During my 22-year career we have seen fundamental changes in medical training, including the introduction of tuition fees for medical school, loss of free accommodation for first-year doctors, the lack of expansion in training numbers, and pay erosion over 15 years.

This has left many resident doctors with crippling debt on graduation, spiralling costs of training, deteriorating pay, and the prospect of unemployment. I, and the authors of the letter, were fortunate enough not to face such hardships during training.

My friend and colleague Suman Fernando, who has died aged 92, had an international reputation in the field of critical psychiatry, particularly in relation to advocating for race equity in mental health.

As well as being a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS for more than 20 years, Suman wrote 14 books and many articles in which he consistently and methodically challenged institutional racism in British mental health provision.

A second embryo bungle in Australia undermines trust in IVF as bioethicists raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest in a system that straddles the boundary between consumer service and healthcare

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IVF is “big business” and experts are concerned about conflicts of interest between profit-making and helping families have children.

Monash IVF’s second embryo bungle has sparked renewed scrutiny on the IVF industry as a whole amid calls for national regulation.

On Friday, state and federal health ministers agreed to a three-month review of the need for a federal scheme.

AviadoBio’s breakthrough therapy hopes to stop progress of FTD, which is usually diagnosed in people under 65

Behind the gleaming glass facade of an office block in east London’s Docklands, Dr Martina Esposito Soccoio is pipetting ribonucleic acid into test tubes.

Here, not far from Canary Wharf’s multinational banks, a British university spinout is working on a breakthrough treatment for a form of dementia that affects millions of people worldwide.

US health secretary announced new members for Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, after firing all 17 experts who held the post

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, named eight new vaccine advisers this week to a critical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel after firing all 17 experts who had held the roles.

New members of the panel include experts who complained about being sidelined, a high-profile figure who has spread misinformation and medical professionals who appear to have little vaccine expertise. Kennedy made the announcement on social media.

Pioneering drug can halt advance of multiple myeloma for three times as long as standard treatments

Thousands of patients in England with blood cancer will become the first in the world to be offered a pioneering “Trojan horse” drug that sneaks inside cancer cells and wipes them out.

In guidance published on Friday, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) gave the green light to belantamab mafodotin, which can halt the advance of multiple myeloma for three times as long as standard treatments.

Research looked at records of 14,800 people in Bradford to see what happened after they moved to more polluted area

What happens to your mental and physical health when you move to an area with worse air pollution? That’s the subject of a fascinating new UK-based study.

Prof Rosie McEachan, the director of NHS Born in Bradford, asked: “Do already unhealthy communities, who are often poorer members of our society, end up in unhealthier environments because no one else wants to live there; or is it the places themselves that are making people ill?”

Government announces £9m funding to make specialist blood machines more widely available across NHS

People living with sickle cell disease in England are to benefit from quicker and more accessible treatment due to a £9m investment, the government has announced.

Apheresis services, which are a type of treatment that removes harmful components from a patient’s blood, are to improve across England through the funding of more specialist treatment centres. The funding will ensure the wider availability of machines that remove a patient’s sickled red blood cells and replace them with healthy donor cells.

Millions of people are taking weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro and off-label Ozempic. But with so many unanswered questions, are we in the middle of a giant human experiment? In this episode, journalist Neelam Tailor asks two doctors what these drugs are really doing to our bodies, our minds, and our society – from muscle loss and mental health to beauty standards and the blurred line between medicine and aesthetics.