Tag Archives: health

Shirley Williams’ campaign against NHS reforms wins new concessions from Lansley

By The Voice | Published 29th January 2012 - 12:30 pm

Here’s how The Guardian reports today’s news that the Coalition will offer further concessions to the NHS reform bill in an attempt to head off a revolt in the House of Lords led by Lib Dem peer Baroness Williams:

… ministers will table a series of amendments to the health and social care bill that will oblige Andrew Lansley to maintain the NHS as a national public service and, his critics say, limit his ambitions to expand the role of the private sector. The changes will also spell out the kind of services that must be offered by GPs and

…

Continue reading »
Posted in News | Also tagged , , | 10 Comments

Don Foster MP writes… It’s time we talked about toilets!

By Don Foster MP | Published 19th November 2011 - 11:45 am

Here in the UK, a toilet is a necessity that we are lucky enough to take for granted – a subject for humour, or something we’d prefer not to talk about.

Yet for billions of people around the world, sanitation is a serious issue. With a staggering 2.6 billion – nearly 40% of the world’s population – living without basic, safe sanitation, it’s time we talked about toilets. It’s a shocking fact that diarrhoea, caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, is the biggest killer of children under five in Africa. In fact, globally it kills more children every year …

Continue reading »
Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | Also tagged , , | 4 Comments

Chris Rennard writes… How to keep people with diabetes out of hospital

By Chris Rennard | Published 3rd November 2011 - 8:45 am

On Tuesday, I helped to launch a report ‘Keeping People with Diabetes out of Hospital‘. As a person with diabetes, I know only too well the pressure that our diabetes care services are under.

Whether I’m speaking to my Diabetes Specialist Nurse, to my consultant, or to my colleagues in Westminster, it is clear that the ‘diabetes epidemic’ is increasingly being recognised as of major concern. Of the 2.9 million people in the UK living with diabetes, a worrying proportion will suffer additional complications and will require hospital care. In the last year alone, another 130,000 people have been …

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 12 Comments

Thousands of botched operations in Scottish hospitals

By Helen Duffett | Published 6th August 2009 - 10:54 am

A parliamentary question by the Liberal Democrats has revealed that more than 3,000 patients’ organs were accidentally cut or punctured during surgery over the past five years.

From the Scotsman:

The figures, obtained by Ross Finnie, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, reveal a series of mistakes, including unintentional cuts during operations, and failure of sterile precautions during surgery.

The errors also include instances where “foreign bodies” were accidentally left in a patient’s body during surgery, and an “inappropriate” operation being carried out.

Mr Finnie, who obtained the statistics through parliamentary answers, said: “Most patients will accept that undergoing operations is not without a

…

Continue reading »
Posted in News, Scotland | Also tagged , | 5 Comments