One of the few positives to note about Jeremy Hunt’s perennial tenure at the Department of Health, is that he’s actually been there long enough to witness his own policies, and rhetoric, unravel. Take the decision last year to scrap bursaries for student nurses. At the time it was obvious to seemingly everyone outside of the Cabinet that encumbering future nursing students with huge private debts would harm applications and jeopardise recruitment, not free up 10,000 new places as was spun at the time. Now the figures are bearing those warnings out – applications for nursing and midwifery training places for September are down 23% year on year. Of course,…
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Vaccine “free for all” market
This article first appeared on the newstatesman.com in March 2016 Take a look at the World Health Assembly’s action plan on tackling the barriers to global vaccination, and time and time again, the almighty dollar comes up. The resolution, passed by all 193 countries present at the Assembly last summer, raises deep concerns about the “increased financial burden of new vaccines”; that “many low- and middle-income countries may not have the opportunity to access newer and improved vaccines, particularly because of the costs related to the procurement and introduction of these vaccines”; and that “globally immunization coverage has increased only marginally since the late 2000s”. Behind the resolution, on the…
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Whistleblowing doctors
How the government is leaving whistleblowing doctors to twist in the wind By Benedict Cooper To the untrained mind the sheer incomprehensibility of legal talk can make courtroom proceedings seem like a thick layer of cloud: featureless and unremarkable. But every now and then, a thunderbolt darts down and catches you by surprise. Sitting in Courtroom One of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) two weeks ago, on the second floor of Fleetbank House, Salisbury Square – in the heart of the legal establishment – I had one of those moments. I was there to report on the latest stage in the legal odyssey of whistleblowing junior doctor Dr Chris Day,…
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The attack on Kunduz Trauma Centre
This article was first published on OpenDemocracy in November OUT OF THE DARKNESS of the Afghan night, in the skies over the Kunduz Trauma Centre, the faint drone of propellers could be heard. Then, the bombing began. The intensive care unit (ICU), where the most critically ill adults and children silently lay, kept alive only by ventilators, was first to be hit. For the next hour the American AC-130 gunship circled its target, unleashing “concentrated volleys” of rockets on the medical centre. As staff escaped the building and fled, they were cut down by machine gun fire from above. What they saw in that terrible hour on October 3, and…
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Hunt thinks junior doctors lack “professionalism…
…and a sense of vocation”? Is he kidding? If Jeremy Hunt isn’t trying to rile the medical profession, he’s got a funny way of going about it. With tensions high and strike action on the cards, saying that contract reforms, the very source of the strain, will bring back “professionalism and a sense of vocation” to a career that attracts some of the most talented and dedicated people around is either a whole new level of crass or it’s designed to inflame. And inflame it has: on Saturday the BMA’s Junior Doctor Committee voted to ballot its members over strike action (or some other form of protest), which could happen…
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Addenbrooke’s hospital is just the canary in the coal mine as far as the NHS is concerned
First published in the New Statesman A toxic cocktail of under-pressure local authorities and low staffing has the NHS on the brink. By Benedict Cooper Among the grim litany of charges laid out in the Francis Report into the Mid Staffordshire scandal, time and again short staffing came up. “It should have been clear,” the report said, “from the history and the nature of the deficiencies being reported, particularly in relation to staffing, that a dangerous situation had been allowed by the Trust leadership to develop and that urgent action and intervention were required”. It went on: “The complaints heard at both the first inquiry and this one testified not…
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The Spokesman
An article I co-wrote with Zenn Athar for the Nottingham We Deserve campaigning newsletter was reproduced in The Spokesman, the publication founded by Bertrand Russell. The article is below. The city has been on the front line of some of the most radical and, many argue, damaging reforms to the NHS since its creation. The Nottingham We Deserve investigates. by Benedict Cooper and Zenn Athar When five of the UK’s leading dermatologists quit the QMC in December, Nottingham was thrust into the middle of a gathering storm of political debate. To many their departure was the latest symbol of a health service breaking down, and a workforce under increasing…
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There is no closure – just grief
New Statesman, August 28th 2015 The headlines about “parity of esteem” between mental and physical health remain just that, warns Benedict Cooper. I don’t need to look very far to find the little black marks on this government’s mental health record. Just down the road, in fact. A short bus journey away from my flat in Nottingham is the Queens Medical Centre, once the largest hospital in Europe, now an embattled giant. Not only has the QMC’s formerly world-renowned dermatology service been reduced to a nub since private provider Circle took over – but that’s for another day – it has lost two whole mental health wards in the past…
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The right wing does the NHS
I realise that Douglas Murray, associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and polemic Spectator columnist, may have ideological even political reasons to bemoan the “perils of a socialised [healthcare] system”. That’s hardly going to come as a shock. What is surprising is that such an elevated journalist as he is willing to let so many innacuracies stand in this careless denigration of the health service. But it’s a useful exercise – it proves that certain stripes within the right have set out to manipulate the truth about the NHS for ideological means. And why they’re wrong. (Incidentally my own writing on medical politics appears mainily on the New Statesman). Murray…
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#weneedtotalkaboutjeremy
New Statesman, July 28th 2015 We need to talk about Jeremy: why doctors are so angry with Jeremy Hunt [1] Jeremy Hunt is at the centre with another row with the medical profession. What’s going on? by Benedict Cooper [2] Published 28 July, 2015 – 09:35 First, do no harm. Photo: Getty Images The long summer break can’t have come too soon for Jeremy Hunt. In the last 10 days alone, two separate waves of vitriol from the medical profession have come crashing down on him, and as he scarpers off to sun himself he must be wondering what type of mood he’ll be coming back to. First there was…
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Nursing in crisis
This piece appeared in PRN Magazine in July 2015 Nursing in crisis: The disappearing numbers A pay-freeze, a row over safe staffing and new rules to kick thousands of nurses out of the country: it’s been a stormy summer in medical politics. Benedict Cooper reports. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the government has it in for the nursing profession. In the last two months alone, a string of policies have put pressure on a workforce already in strife, and laid some shaky stones to step over next.First NHS England asks NICE to halt an investigation into safe staffing – to the approval of the Department of Health but…
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The quiet exodus of GPs
This article appeared in the New Statesman in July 2015 George Osborne quietly slipped into his budget some news that the medical staff perhaps dreaded, perhaps didn’t even imagine was possible: the public sector pay freeze will continue. For another four years. I’ll just let that sink in. For months, doctors and nurses have been begging the public and the government to take notice: pressure on the wards is building to dangerous levels. Medical staff are overworked, under-appreciated and underpaid, and now there’s this insult to injury – a further slap in the face from a Chancellor unwilling to reward their graft with a share of the recovery, for which they…
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The time bomb at the heart of the NHS
This article appeared in the New Statesman on July 1st 2015 Staffing: the time bomb at the heart of the NHS There’s an unnerving continuity at the Department of Health: a maddeningly consistent split between two realities. First there’s what’s going on in the wards, in the hearts and minds of the profession. Then there is what ministers like Jeremy Hunt and Ben Gummer say at the despatch box. The DoH must be aware, for example, that on Tuesday the Royal College of Nurses (RCN) voted 99.4 per cent in favour of a motion to lobby to reinstate the investigation by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) into staffing…
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The market is reaping as Hunt sows
This article appeared on Open Democracy: Our NHS on Tuesday June 2 The market is reaping as Jeremy Hunt sows Tough talk by the Health Secretary on NHS agency costs belies the fact that the problem occured on his watch – and as a result of his government’s market policies. Today’s announcement on reducing the costs of agency nursing staff sounds like good old Tory get tough stuff. The NHS “needs to deliver its side of the bargain, which is to make efficiency savings”, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said today. He continued: “Can we really afford the kind of care we all want? With a strong economy, the answer is…
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The blind faith of the right (+what’s left for the left)
‘Sanctioned’ by Dani Lafez. Dani’s artwork is for sale here – proceeds go to arthritis research. The blind faith of the right (and what’s left for the Left) Dani is a very poorly lady. Severe rheumatoid arthritis is attacking her spine, she has a snapped lumbar ligament, and last week after a gruelling eight needles were injected into her vertebra, an x-ray revealed that a hoped operation to fuse two of the disks in her back wouldn’t be possible because the surrounding disks have disintegrated too much. At the age of 26 she is facing the rest of her life taking morphine, by 40 she is likely to be…
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We tried
I won’t lie, I felt pretty abject on May 8th. So many hopes shattered, so many people now entering frightening unknowns, feeling insecure, threatened, battle-weary; so much disappointment, so many careers dashed and prospects ruined. This is the reality which a whole nation of healthcare workers woke up to the day after the election. Because we the Left could not persuade you the voting public what was at stake yesterday. I’m sorry. I’m sorry we could not speak over the volume of a right-wing press complicit in the dismantling of our greatest public service. We could not persuade the BBC to give you the facts, or ask the government the right questions…
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I’m voting to save the NHS
I’m embarrassed to admit, that I used to dismiss talk of the ways the NHS was changing. I’d read a few things, but never really understood what it all meant. I never really grasped the true nature of the health service, its history and the way it is being altered today. I shrugged off talk about private companies taking over, and counter-argued with the fact that the population was growing, ageing, and as a result the way we funded its care needed to change. But for the past 18 months I’ve covered medical politics for a number of titles, including the New Statesman, Open Democracy, and others. It’s been a fascinating,…
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Election special: PRN Magazine
A special election report for PRN Magazine analysing the main party manifestos and how nurses felt they were being represented in the campaigns. http://www.prnmagazine.com/election/2015/5/3/election-2015-special-report Tweet
