This article first appeared in the New Statesman on January 15 2016 Junior doctors aren’t just going on strike. They’re trying to warn us There’s a bigger story than just pay and conditions, warns Benedict Cooper. By Benedict Cooper On a bitterly cold afternoon in Nottingham’s Old Market Square, a group of junior doctors stood shivering together, banners in hand, pleading with the people hurrying by in thick winter coats and scarves to listen to their reasons for why they and colleagues throughout England are on strike. A few stopped, tapping their feet in the chill air; some even signed their petition. On the surface it’s about pay. But there’s…
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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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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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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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On the trail…
…with the March for the NHS A few shots from another wonderful gathering arranged by the People’s Vote for the NHS. It was held in Nottingham on March 28th, with a large crowd marching from the Forest Recreation Ground into the Market Square, where a host of great speakers including organiser Rehan Azam, Green Party PPC Lydia Davies-Bright, local nurse Lisa Clarke and others addressed the crowd. Tweet
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NHS: the hard questions
…If the Today programme won’t ask the difficult questions about the NHS, I will When David Cameron woke up this morning, surely he must have had a little tingle of nerves about his appearance on the Today show. On the NHS alone, his record as PM has left enough questions to fill the whole three hour show; surely a short sharp burst from Sarah Montague was going to be an excruciating experience. Today’s researchers had plenty to choose from. For years, long before that insidious document, the Health and Social Care Act was enforced on the system, alarm bells have been ringing. The BMA, the Royal College of GPs, the…
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NHS Reinstatement Bill
A new Bill plots the way back for the NHS – but it’s not Labour who are behind it First published in the New Statesman on Wednesday March 11th Later today, in the dusk of this parliament, a new Bill will get its first and perhaps only reading in the Commons. It’s unlikely to set pulses racing in any of the main party machines, but in certain circles the NHS Bill [3] represents the last ditch to save a dying public service. It is the result of three years of patient work led by two leading public health experts, Professor Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick of the Centre for Primary…
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Labour’s murky PFI past
The following article appeared on the New Statesman’s online blog, The Staggers in July 2014 To save the NHS, Labour must face the ugly truth of PFI debts Labour is right to focus on rescuing the NHS from the harm done by this government, but must face the truth that it was the party that introduced private finance into the health service in the first place. Ed Miliband has said that this is going to be an “NHS summer”. He has sensed, rightly, that there’s something in the air, a tension over the precarious health service. Strain on services is rising, the number of hospitals in the red is surging…
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Revolutiony Wutiony
Once upon a time, I was invited to watch a man masturbate. It was a show in an artist’s bedroom, where, to the gathered audience, the sound of a drum and the background of a poetry recital, he was going to indulge in a long drawn-out wank, and bring himself to climax. I declined. But I’ve often thought perhaps I should have gone. I’ve tried to picture the scene, and me standing there, and wondered how I would have felt. Whether it might have drawn some conservative, reactionary indignation from me. Or whether it might, in fact, have been fascinating and resonate with meaning. I’ll never know now. But I…
