Druin Burch is a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine.
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Florence Nightingale, born in Florence on this day in 1820, made her world measurably better. She counted the dead until the living had to listen. Her contemporary in Crimea, Mary Seacole, is now zealously celebrated alongside her – and for the wrong reasons. Nightingale acted from duty, Seacole from entrepreneurial ambition Seacole, Jamaican and mixed-race,
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‘The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking!’ Donald Trump announced on Thursday. In their honour, after their White House visit, he is removing tariffs on Scotch whiskey and bourbon, ‘two very important industries within Scotland and Kentucky’. A few more visits from
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Wes Streeting has said women have been treated like ‘second-class citizens whose voices don’t matter’. ‘The blunt reality is the NHS is failing women and girls on even the most basic measures of healthcare,’ he added. The Health Secretary’s new women’s health strategy promises £72 million. The problem is that his new men’s health strategy
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Kemi Badenoch has said she will ban doctors from striking. Yesterday, asked if he would do the same, Health Secretary Wes Streeting refused to rule it out. The police aren’t allowed to strike and nor is the military. Why should doctors be different? The junior doctors are now on day four of their six-day strike;
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In the emergency department, and on my wards, the strikes sit lightly. My specialty of internal medicine never closes; Easter Monday was a normal working day. The only difference from today until Monday next is that junior doctors will be scarce. Not terribly scarce, in truth, since many are as disenchanted with the strikes as
The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority
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Nigel Lawson said the NHS was the closest we had to a religion. What’s needed today is someone willing to declare that this church has become corrupt, self-protective, and hostile to its own founding purpose. In the latest demonstration of its chronic failure, the NHS has all but certainly missed a range of targets, from
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Immediately after the Easter weekend, junior doctors are planning a six-day strike. Unless they call it off, Starmer has said today, they’ll be punished. They have been offered a deal. On the table is an above-inflation pay rise, along with government funding for postgraduate exams that doctors have historically paid for themselves, and an offer
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Next door to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm, behind spiked steel fencing and overlooked by edge-of-town bungalows, are the grounds of my daughter’s football team, the Chipping Norton Swifts Under-15 Girls. On cold, leaden Saturdays, I stand and watch. The clubhouse does cups of instant coffee for a pound but they take only cash. I don’t bring
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What is it that doctors actually do? The answer is not obvious and I say that as a physician who has spent the past 30 years in hospitals. But the question matters. Which tasks can be done better or more cheaply by nurses, paramedics or AI depends upon it. So, too, does the government’s push
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Two people have died of meningitis in Kent: an eighteen year old year 13 student named as Juliette, and an unnamed 21-year-old. The outbreak has centred on a nightclub, Club Chemistry, and on a private party. Since news of the outbreak broke, the newspapers and television have been full of images of students queuing patiently
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The BBC has described itself as being set to enter ‘managed decline’. The government is currently reviewing the broadcaster’s charter, and yesterday the BBC issued a response to its green paper saying that if the status quo remains, public service broadcasting will die. ‘Huge changes in the media market, audience behaviours, and an outdated funding
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Health Secretary Wes Streeting has tried using the NHS for social engineering before. Previously, he’s suggested that weight-loss jabs could get people back to work. This week he’s gone further. Yesterday, Streeting said that ‘for the first time’ he would be ‘making the NHS accountable for patients’ employment outcomes’. Streeting is right that ill health
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‘If there is one thing I dislike,’ said P.G. Wodehouse, ‘it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.’ His grievance was conversational, mine is nominative: I pity those with made-up names. There was a time when names came from a modest catalogue: the Bible, aunts and uncles
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New research reveals a startling truth about the people paying thousands for weight-loss drugs: they’re mostly middle-aged, wealthy women. In other news, February is cold and the snowdrops are here. The Health Foundation, a British health charity backed by a billion-pound endowment, confirmed today what most people would have guessed: those paying thousands of pounds
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Last month the World Health Organisation removed Britain from its list of countries where measles had been effectively eliminated. The disease has been circulating continuously since late 2023. Last year there were almost a thousand cases, and a child died in Liverpool. Now there is a measles outbreak in Haringey and Enfield. So far it
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People who drink coffee and tea are less likely to suffer dementia, according to a large study published this week. The research is from Harvard and appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of my profession’s top outlets. There is every reason to presume its conclusion is wrong. A total of
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Junior doctors have voted to extend their strikes – by a whisker. Turnout for yesterday’s vote collapsed to less than 53 per cent – a whisker above the threshold needed to make it legal. Framed as a pay dispute, the strikes are the result of a needlessly ruined career structure, and a government perversely willing
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By the calendar it is winter, but the days are longer and the birds are singing. Snowdrops are scattered around the front door, and crocuses have already broken through on my lawn. Mostly they are slim and pale, but when the sun has shone they have opened their purple cups to its warmth. Virginia Woolf
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Tesla’s last quarterly report revealed that deliveries had declined for the second year running and, for the first time, annual revenues had fallen. “It is starting to look as if Tesla is finished,” concluded a piece in The Spectator. To what extent Musk will succeed can’t be known, but his track record demands thoughtful uncertainty at
