Tag Archives: health services

Lib Dem MPs on health crisis: government has got it badly wrong

By Andy Boddington | Thu 13th October 2022 - 4:04 pm

One of the most stunning non-answers in the House of Commons of late was Liz Truss’s response to Daisy Cooper at PMQs yesterday on the danger of collapsing hospital buildings. The here today, and possibly gone tomorrow, prime minister either didn’t hear the question or did not know how to respond (Hansard).

In a debate in Westminster Hall, Daisy Cooper was again in action, this time on the preventive covid-19 drug Evusheld. This is a pre-exposure prophylactic drug administered by injections that gives a degree of protection against catching Covid-19. There are around half a million immunosuppressed people in the UK who could benefit from this treatment, including people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. But the government refuses to make it immediately available, instead waiting on a NICE review which may not conclude until well in 2023, after the expected winter surge in illness, including Covid and seasonal flu. Cooper said the government had got this “badly wrong”.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged daisy cooper, featured, helen morgan MP and liz truss | 7 Comments

MP slams Government for failure to improve health services for trans people

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 4th January 2019 - 10:25 am

Maria Miller, the Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, has slammed the Government for failing to improve health services for transgender people. And there’s a particular Liberal Democrat dimension to this as senior Liberal Democrats actually helped to collect the evidence on this in the first place.

Ms Miller said yesterday that basic healthcare taken for granted by the general public is “out of reach” for trans people.

From The Independent:

The committee is due to publish a new report on the care of LGBT+ people in the coming weeks but Ms Miller has already warned services are “going backwards quickly” – with trans people among the worst affected.

“Many trans people simply don’t have access to the basic healthcare that the rest of us take for granted – things like cervical smears are often things that trans men are not able to access,” Ms Miller told the Press Association.Theresa May did commit to reforming the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to remove intrusive red tape for those legally changing gender, and launched a £1m LGBT+ health and social care fund in November.

However, Ms Miller said the focus on legal reforms has “eclipsed” efforts to improve trans people’s experiences.

“As a result there has been a debate focusing in on things that really are not as important as making sure that trans people have access to public services, and the debate has been focused in on issues that are much less important to trans people’s lives,” she said.

And that Liberal Democrat dimension? Well, almost three years ago, Ms Miller’s Committee published a report on transgender equality. A fair bit of the evidence for the health section of that report was gathered thanks to our Sarah Brown and Zoe O’Connell, who asked for it using #transdocfail on Twitter. Zoe wrote about it on her blog in 2013: