A couple of weeks ago James Graham helpfully documented one of the more rapid reverse ferrets in recent political history; the rapid withdrawal of a wholly idiotic Lib Dem statement made in response to the Science and Technology Committee’s recently published evidence check report on homeopathy. This week, James is back with a revised Lib Dem statement on homeopathy which he bizarrely describes as ’sensible and measured’. Frankly, ‘disingenuous and weaselling’ would be a rather more apt description of the new statement, which reads as follows:

A recent report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee examined the provision of homeopathy through the NHS and called for funding by the NHS to be stopped. The Committee did recognise that many users derive benefit from its use and did not argue that such treatments should be banned.

When it comes to NHS provision, we support a review by NICE into the cost effectiveness of Complementary and Alternative (CAMs) therapies, including homeopathy; as well as expanding the work of NICE to look at the cost-effectiveness of existing conventional treatments.

The Liberal Democrats believe that, as a basic principle, individuals should have maximum freedom about how they choose to get treated, so long as the therapy is safe. We know that many complementary therapies are popular with the public. The NHS budget is limited and we want to make sure that NHS funding is focused on treatments which are efficacious and cost-effective. NICE reviews of all existing treatments would give us the best possible basis for future decisions over funding.

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Guest post by Richard blogger

Andrew Lansley has recently written about the main Conservative health policies. He justifies his policy to privatise parts of the NHS using the following statement about productivity:

“we can not go on seeing productivity fall in our public services, just as it rises in the private sector”

But if we look at productivity in healthcare, the NHS is actually more efficient than the private sector. continue reading… »

Put simply, stuff like this at Stafford hospital should not be happening in the 2010s, and it’s wrong to try and explain it away as ‘local management failure from which lessons need to be learned’, or any such nonsense. For a conscientious ex-nurse like myself, who would often stay on into the night shift to do the paperwork, it makes painful reading, but the worst parts do deserve a re-read:

Poorly trained health care assistants brought meals to patients without helping them feed themselves, elderly men were left to wander the ward in a confused state, vulnerable patients were left hungry, dirty and frequently in pain. Some patients were so thirsty they were reduced to drinking from the flower vases scattered around the ward.

“Patients were screaming out in pain because they could not get pain relief. Patients would fall out of bed and we would have to go hunting for staff,” she said. “It was like a Third World country hospital.

“Things were so bad on the ward that I started feeding, watering and taking all the other patients to the lavatory,” she said. “It felt like it was not just my mum I watched dying, but all the others as well.”

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The Healthcare Commission’s investigation found that during 2006/07 Stafford and Cannock Chase Hospitals were in dire need of extra nurses. Their complement was short of 120 nurses, 17 of them in A&E, 30 in the surgical division and 77 on the medical wards. By November 2008 they were still 40 nurses short in total.

The last paragraph is important , because it reflects where the priority should lie. More than half the shortages came in the medical wards. continue reading… »

Ed Miliband, or at least his tweetmeister, has been asking for suggestions on what should be in Labour’s health manifesto for the coming election.

Now in principle, I’m against this sort of thing. Policy should be developed in branches, in CLPs, in unions and debated on the conference floor.

Even so, I have to admit there’s something quite attractive about being able to bung an idea into 140 characters and send it direct to someone given ministerial authority to pretend to be a minister online.

I think it’s a good way of picking up the odd good, practical idea for change that fits within the broad manifesto statement and brings it a bit more to life than it might otherwise.

So an experienced but now ex-nurse, as an ex-Director of a Primary Care Trust, as an experience developer of social enterprises, and as a Labour leader on a small council, I tweeted six quick ideas, all of which I think would make a decent positive difference to the NHS’s work, and all of which have the virtue of not costing that much.

Here they are, in unadulterated tweet form:

@EdMilibandMP #health Set up local social enterprises to conduct local needs and opportunities research with funds top-sliced from GP commissioning budget

@EdMilibandMP #health Re-democratize PCTs, especially if Adult Social Care functions are moved to the NHS, by creating real veto power in Overview & Scrutiny

#health @EdMilibandMP Reinforce valuable role of walk-in centres by secondment of A&E staff and provision of further emergency capacity.

@EdMilibandMP #health Provide seed corn funding for replication in medical wards of brilliant acute psychiatry www.starwards.org.uk/ idea

@EdMilibandMP #health Reintegrate fully the career development path for care workers/nurses so that nursing degree becomes possible for all

@EdMilibandMP #health Provide ‘guidance’ on minimum nursing staff levels in acute medical/elderly wards & ensure this is priority over all else

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Don Paskini adds: Those are Paul’s ideas – now over to you. In 140 characters or fewer, which ideas do you think would improve the NHS (or any other area of policy) ?

contribution by Sarah Morrison

“Save Whittington A&E, Save Whittington Maternity,” demanded demonstrators the Saturday just gone.

Thousands marched from Highbury Corner to Whittington Hospital in North London on Saturday to protest against the possible closure of A&E departments across North Central London and rally against what they see as a systematic downgrading of public health services in the capital city.

Whittington Hospital serves 250,000 people in the boroughs of Islington and Haringey. It faces being downsized to a “local” hospital under plans put forward by the North Central London NHS – the anger amongst the crowd became clear.

“Everyone in this community relies on this hospital, millions have been spent on doing it up and we now have a top-notch, first-rate local hospital, and we are going to keep it this way,” said MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
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Rumour has it that the Department of Health is considering mandatory health warnings on all alcoholic drinks in the style of tobacco products.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never met anyone -not a single person – who’s ever quit smoking after reading health signs on packets of fags. Like, NOT ONE.

Introduced in the early nineties, warnings such as “Smoking kills”, “you’re gonna die” and “What a piece of shit you are for smoking” were made to cover at least 30% of a cigarette pack in 2003 – presumably a measure for the inattentive. Most recently, “picture warnings” have also been introduced, along with measures to “hide cigarettes under the counter”.

But with alcohol the contradictions will just be comedy material.

Here’s a government that makes a substance available 24/7, practically everywhere, but then goes apeshit that those bottles and cans don’t carry a clear enough warning that the same substance is bad for you.
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Do the Tories really want to pick a fight over the issue of teenage pregnancies?

The reason I ask is not just because of the Tory’s latest statistical debacle; although it has to be said that their inability to get a decimal point in the right place hardly inspires confidence in a party that has aspirations of becoming the next government and taking over the running of the economy.

Last year, I put together a (popular) article that sifted some of the facts about teenage pregnancy from the media-driven fiction.

With an election in the offing, and the Tories already threatening to turn this issue into a political Aunt Sally, yet again, its seems to me to be about the right time to revisit this issue again and look at what the evidence has to say rather than what the Daily Mail would like you to believe.
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After falling flat on his face as a result of his last foray into the realm of statistics you might think that a certain Tory blogger would have learned a valuable lesson. But, no, he’s back again and making yet another raft of daft mistakes:

Burying Bad News on NHS Waiting Times

Whenever there’s a major political event, you always need to watch what government press office put out. And true to form, today the Department of Health is trying to bury bad news. At 10.06am an email dropped into my Inbox with the alluring headline

STATISTICAL PRESS NOTICE – NHS INPATIENT AND OUTPATIENT WAITING TIMES FIGURES – 31st December 2009
I nearly didn’t bother to look, but suspicion got the better of me. It turns out that patient waiting times have increased dramatically in 2009.

The number of inpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 13 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 57,600, an increase of 12,300 (27.3%) from November 2009, and a rise of 18,000 (45.3%) from December 2008.

The number of outpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 8 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 74,100, an increase of 11,700 (18.8%) from November 2009, but a rise of 26,900 (57.0%) from December 2008.

Shouldn’t the press release have been headlined…

Labour Increases NHS Waiting Times by 50%?

UPDATE: The Dept of Health has been in touch to deny this is burying bad news. They say that these figures always come out on the last Friday of the month.

Credit where its due, Iain’s already sort of acknowledged his first mistake – had he checked the DoH’s website, he might have noticed that this is nothing more than a routine statistical release that the DoH does issue at the same time every month.

As for his suggestion for an alternative headline, Iain’s got that badly wrong as well because he’s forgotten – or more likely never learned – one of the cardinal rules of statistics.

One statistic does not make a trend. continue reading… »

contribution by Left Outside

Last year a girl died following allegedly consuming a mixture of Ketamine and Mephedrone.

A following coroner’s report established that there were no drugs in her system and that she died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection.

The reporting of this at the time should have been described as scandalously irresponsible by any sensible definition of the term.

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This morning’s guest post by Zarathustra, of the excellent Mental Nurse blog, flagged up the existence of a right-wing campaign group calling itself ‘Nurses for Reform’, and as Lib Con’s resident data hound that naturally prompted me to ask a very pertinant question:

Just exactly how many of the people behind ‘Nurses for Reform’ are actually nurses?

Is this actually a genuine organisation that can point to a significant level of support within the nursing profession or it is, like the Taxpayers’ Alliance, just another small, well funded, right-wing front organisation with a name carefully chosen to mislead the naive and unwary into taking it for something it almost certainly isn’t?

So who, exactly, are ‘Nurses for Reform’?

Well, their director and primary mouthpiece is Dr Helen Evans RGN and she is, indeed, a nurse with 20 years experience in the NHS under her belt and a PhD in health management from Brunel University. So she’s a doctor, but not in the medical sense of the term.

As for her organisation, it claims to be a ‘growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-oriented reform of European healthcare systems’, although evidence of any links to like-minded nurses organisations or campaign groups are a bit thin on the ground.

The other noticeable feature of the NFR website is, with the exception of a page listing members of advisory board, the marked lack of reference to anyone other than Dr Helen Evans, who appears to be the site’s sole contributor, contact point and, for all anyone knows, chief cook and bottle-washer.

Not exactly a flying start then, but there is an advisory board, so maybe we’ll find a few more nurses there…
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contribution by Zarathustra

Nurses for Reform have been featured on Liberal Conspiracy before. They’re a campaigning group with links to the libertarian Adam Smith Institute and ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think-tanks.

Last month they met with David Cameron to discuss their ideas, which included wholesale privatisation of the NHS, the scrapping of national pay agreements for health workers and nurses being given brands like consumer products.

The idea of competing brands of nurses (None of yer manky Tesco nurses working in our hospital. We only use Sainsburys nurses) might sound daft, but this weekend Nurses For Reform crossed the line from silly to downright offensive.

Their leading spokesperspon has been strongly implying the NHS was created along Nazi principles.
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Liberal Conspiracy has uncovered evidence that strongly suggests that a parliamentary committee which, last week, came out in favour of introducing a statutory minimum unit price for alcohol, was given misleading evidence on the scale of alcohol-related deaths in the UK.

We’ve found that that official government statistics for alcohol-related deaths, produced annually by the Office for National Statistics, have routinely been inflated by anything up to 1,100 deaths a year by the inclusion of deaths from liver diseases for which alcohol was not identified as a cause on individual death certificates.

One of these diseases, biliary cirrhosis, which accounts for around 160-180 deaths a year in the UK, was initially linked to coeliac disease in the late 1970s (Logan RF 1978) and was clearly identified as being caused by an auto-immune disorder by the year 2000 (Nakanuma Y 2000). It was not, however, excluded from official statistics for alcohol-related deaths until 2006.

However, there is also clear evidence that, overall, official ONS estimates fail to show the true extent of alcohol-related mortality in the UK by excluding mortality data for a significant number of causes of death in which alcohol use is known to be a significant causal factor, including several common cancers, road traffic accidents and alcohol-related violence.
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A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.

Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.

He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.

They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.

The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.

So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.
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If you were to ask David Cameron to sum up the content of the Conservative Party’s draft health manifesto in three words then I dare say he’d reply, ‘decentralisation, accountability and transparency’.

Read the manifesto for yourself, and you’ll quickly find three much better words to describe it, ‘lies, libel and price-fixing‘.

Now, admittedly, you do expect that political parties will be somewhat economical with the truth in setting out their manifestos, but by any reasonable standards, the lie contained in this manifesto’s introduction is a whopper…

We understand the pressures the NHS faces. In recognition of its special place in our society, we are committed to protecting health spending in real terms – we will not make the sick pay for Labour’s Debt Crisis. But that doesn’t mean the NHS shouldn’t change. When you’re more likely to die of cancer in Britain than most other countries in Europe -

You are not more likely to die of cancer in Britain than in most other European countries as a peer reviewed study of estimated cancer incidence and mortality rates in 39 European countries, which was published in 2007 in ‘Annals of Oncology’, clearly demonstrates. continue reading… »

The process of producing a good lunchbox is one of trial and error; claim & counter-claim; constant negotiation between producer and customer. My brother and I weren’t easy customers to please.

For a few years we were quite happy with Dairylea in our sandwiches, until we discovered that Dairylea was cheese, and ‘Mum, we don’t like cheese!‘ We went our separate ways after that: Jon took a shine to ham & tomato ketchup; I developed a thing for Bernard Matthews turkey slices, which she sprinkled with salt and sprayed with barbeque sauce.

But it was always the deserts which caused the most angst. Did we want Wagon Wheels or Chocolate Rolls? Jam Tarts or Fondant Fancies? Yoghurt or fromage frais? How do you keep yoghurt cool without resorting to an ice pack which’ll make your sandwich soggy?

Were it not for love, my mother wouldn’t have bothered. Each tacky little Tupperware box we carried to school was an expression of devotion, and that she constantly evolved the menu to serve our fickle tastes was a sign that she wanted to send us to school with something from her to us.
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Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.

The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.

And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.

So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
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Here’s some text from the Conservative NHS manifesto

British patients should be among the first in the world to use effective treatments, but under Labour they are among the last. The current system lets Ministers off the hook by blaming decisions on unaccountable bureaucrats in NICE, the agency which approves drugs for the NHS.

That’s right, damn those ‘unaccountable bureaucrats’ at NICE! The Tories will ensure that accountable ministers will instead make decisions so you can punish them if necessary.

Quite uncharitably, Alex Massie at the Spectator says to that: “The best one can say about this is that it’s total gibberish.” Doh!

But let’s assume we want these decisions to be more accountable. A good idea in theory right? But what’s this?

With less political interference in the NHS, we will turn the Department of Health into a Department of Public Health so that the prevention of illness gets the attention from government it needs.

Less political interference? But I thought that was more ‘accountable’ surely?

Can we file this under the Steve Hilton award for ‘Progressive Gobbledegook’?

David Cameron spent some time in a House of Commons private office with Nurses for Reform earlier this month seeking inspiration to remodel the National Health Service.

We are told he wanted to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and have them present a range of ideas.

We already know what Daniel Hannan thinks of the ‘60 year mistake’ but what does Cameron think? He would have us believe he ‘loves the NHS’ and it is ’safe in his hands’ and surely consulting nurses proves this? However it’s worth examing the people associated with Nurses for Reform, which is:

growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-led reform of British, European and other healthcare systems around the world.

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contribution by Claire Spencer

Summits like Copenhagen can be frustrating because, by necessity, they place all the cards for positive (and negative) change in the hands of world leaders and delegates. The rest of us can only watch as our path to the future is pulled apart, rearranged and stuck back together. And when it all goes wrong, we feel more disenfranchised and powerless than ever.

But we do have power – and furthermore, we have the capacity to make meaningful change on an international level. Recently, I was inspired to act by Tristram Stuart’s Waste, an amazing narrative that uses reams of data to put our food wastage in a global context.

In the West, 10 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from producing food that is never eaten. In the UK, 752,290 tonnes of CO2 is used to produce our waste food, and 87,767 hectares of our land.

Personal profligacy is obviously a factor, and it clearly never hurts to keep an eye on how we all purchase, store and consume food. But it is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste generated by our major supermarkets.
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If I hadn’t, a quarter of a century ago, in the heat of the moment, cast aside the class-based distinctions, built into the NHS rules, which said I must wait upon a doctor’s order in spite of what we both knew or didn’t know, that diabetic gentleman slipping into coma would have suffered brain damage. Perhaps he would have died. Class could have killed him.

I used to work as a nurse. One evening, I was just doing a last walk round the ward, checking on anyone I had particular concerns about, having a laugh with one or two of the regulars, making sure people were settled before the night shift nurses came on.

As I came to the bed of the gentleman who’d just been transferred over from A&E a few minutes before, it took me a second to work out something was wrong.

His pyjama top was soaked and for a second I looked to see if he’d dropped the water jug as he fell asleep.

But then it clicked. I grabbed a lancet and the blood test strip tube from my pocket and stabbed for blood, but even before the blood was on the strip I knew there was no sugar in there to change the colour; the sudden drenching of sweat could only mean he was in hypoglycemic shock and heading swiftly for coma. continue reading… »