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New Statesman • 7th June 2024

Craig Ritchie: “Dementia is a crisis of our own making”

As political parties push on with their election campaigns, grand promises are being made about tackling sky-high NHS waiting lists. If elected, Keir Starmer has promised to deliver 40,000 extra appointments, scans and operations a week to get non-urgent waits down to the 18-week target, while Rishi Sunak has pledged to boost the number of GP appointments and increase the scope of pharmacists to treat more common conditions. There are currently 7.5 million cases of people waiting for elective (n

New Statesman • 11th March 2024

The government is running before it can walk on NHS digital transformation

In his Budget last week, the Chancellor vowed to transform the NHS digitally. Jeremy Hunt pledged £3.4bn towards boosting the health service’s productivity, particularly through “harnessing new technology” such as artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce admin and speed up diagnoses.

This feels like déjà vu – the government has promised this grand transformation before, yet the NHS remains woefully behind on its digital proficiency. Ten years ago, when Hunt was health secretary, he promised to ma

New Statesman • 7th March 2024

Could ultra-processed food be the new smoking?

In the 1930s and 1940s, tobacco companies battled it out via advertising to be known as the “healthiest” cigarette brands. Adverts featured illustrations of smiling doctors clutching their favourite packets, with notorious campaigns reassuring the public that “More doctors smoke Camels”. Some of these ads even appeared in medical journals.

Now we know the catastrophic health implications of smoking, restrictions on tobacco products have increased dramatically over recent decades. It’s illegal t

New Statesman • 21st February 2024

Esther Ghey: “The internet unleashed horrific things”

When Esther Ghey walked through the door of a huge co-working space on the seventh floor of Television Centre, the former home of the BBC in White City, London, she smiled with a hint of tiredness. Ghey has faced an overwhelming amount of media attention in the year since the death of her daughter, Brianna.

As she sat down on the sofa across from me, coffee in hand, I noticed the tattoos that travel up her arm – a homage to her child. “I have some bad days,” Ghey, who is 37 and dressed in a sma

New Statesman • 5th February 2024

Seema Malhotra: The Tories are short-changing young people

The shadow skills minister Seema Malhotra first stood for the Labour Party in 1983, when she was 11 years old. As a candidate in her primary school council elections, inspired by her grandmother and four siblings, she pledged better pensions and more public facilities for children. She didn’t win, but she did come second.

At the age of 15, Malhotra gave her second major polemic. Asked by her English teacher to write about something that “wound [her] up”, she chose Margaret Thatcher. Not much la

New Statesman • 26th January 2024

Is Labour's Child Health Action Plan fit for purpose?

This month, Labour released a Child Health Action Plan, which lays out how it would improve young people’s health and well-being if the party wins the next general election. The plan has seven proposals centred around cutting NHS waiting lists, improving mental health support, widening access to NHS dentistry, tackling smoking and vaping, banning junk food advertising aimed at children, introducing free healthy breakfast clubs in every primary school, and protecting children from infectious dise

New Statesman • 15th January 2024

Parkrun founder: “It’s everybody’s right to be active and healthy”

It’s January, it’s cold outside, and yet this weekend around 200,000 people across the country will brave the freeze and head to their local park for a group 5-kilometre run.

Better known as Parkrun, the initiative started in 2004 as a small running club for a group of friends in Bushy Park, west London, who would jog and then go for coffee. Now it has spread around the world, taking place every weekend in 2,500 locations globally, including 1,236 in the UK.

Today, Parkrun may be a “public hea

New Statesman • 19th December 2023

Exclusive: Half of Conservative councillors think the NHS has worsened since 2010

As NHS waiting lists grow and staff shortages persist, it’s become general knowledge that the impact of austerity and cuts to public services have pushed the UK’s healthcare system to breaking point. But exclusive polling of England’s councillors conducted by New Statesman Spotlight* reveals that it’s not just the government’s opponents who think this.

Overall, more than four fifths (86.4 per cent) of all councillors surveyed said that the state of health and social care was “worse” or “much wo

New Statesman • 28th November 2023

Will Labour grasp the opportunities of new technology?

The government spent months trailing its AI summit – the UK’s assertion of its relevance to the global debate on how to regulate the technology of the moment. But the resounding image from this month’s meeting was of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak interviewing Elon Musk. With a series of softball questions, Sunak and the richest man in the world had a quasi-philosophical discussion about how AI could make humans obsolete.

And yet, despite the existential concerns over artificial intelligence, the P

New Statesman • 23rd November 2023

The problem with Jeremy Hunt’s pledge to get people “fit for work”

The UK is on course for a huge rise in ill health, with one in five adults projected to be living with major illnesses like cancer, heart disease and diabetes by 2040. Despite this, the Autumn Statement was devoid of any substantial interventions that would help to curb disease rates in the coming decades. Instead, the Chancellor focused on forcing people who are sick back into work in a bid to improve the country’s productivity.

Jeremy Hunt’s most punitive measure includes reforming the work c

New Statesman • 17th November 2023

Will the Online Safety Act protect us or infringe our freedoms?

Six years after the idea first materialised, the Online Safety Act has finally passed into law. It’s long overdue – since its invention, the internet has had little-to-no regulation. And in the years since, it has grown increasingly all-encompassing, embedding itself in every facet of people’s lives.

Recent global events show the impact of a completely unlegislated online world. Social media has been awash with falsified information of the Israel-Hamas conflict, making it increasingly difficult

New Statesman • 31st October 2023

“The ‘nanny state’ has given us a lot of freedom,” says England’s leading public health director

At the Conservative Party conference Rishi Sunak surprised delegates by making a bold health policy commitment – his intention to ban cigarettes for anyone currently aged 14 or under. The Prime Minister’s announcement incited outrage from his libertarian peers, including his predecessor Liz Truss, who made it very clear she would vote against such “illiberal” legislation.

Disagreement over what role the government should play in personal choice is not limited to the Conservative Party. People i

New Statesman • 31st August 2023

“There is no single recipe”: Bogotá’s mayor on its low-emission zone

This week the Mayor of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) scheme was expanded across all the capital’s boroughs. Ulez – which has caused divisions within political parties as well as between them – is intended to improve London’s air quality and reduce pollution-linked disease by charging drivers of the most polluting vehicles £12.50 a day. Vehicle emissions such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter can exacerbate and contribute to asthma, lung disease, cancer and dementia, among othe

New Statesman • 21st August 2023

Private care is not the answer to the NHS crisis

Housing, heating, food – all these essentials have been subject to the whims of inflation over the past two years. While prices are now increasing less rapidly, they’re still rising, and interest rate hikes are expected to follow. Healthcare has, however, until recently remained the final life necessity that is affordable and accessible. Aneurin Bevan founded the NHS on the principle that care would be free at the point of service for everyone, whether that was a cancer diagnosis, a hip replacem

New Statesman • 14th August 2023

The NHS workforce crisis is holding back cancer diagnosis

In treating cancer, prevention and early detection are key to saving lives, and technology in this area is advancing at pace. Last week, the Health Secretary Steve Barclay committed to delivering personalised cancer vaccines by 2030 in partnership with the biotechnology company BioNTech. While last month, a new blood test that can detect 50 types of cancer at a very early stage showed promising results in an NHS trial.

The Galleri blood test picks up on fragments of tumour DNA in the bloodstrea

New Statesman • 27th July 2023

Charity chief: “We know it’s controversial but clean air zones work"

The Conservatives and Labour remain split over London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). But Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of Asthma + Lung UK, says the government urgently needs to prioritise tackling air pollution, smoking rates and poor-quality homes, to reduce the prevalence of respiratory conditions.

In the UK, people in the poorest communities are seven times more likely to die of a lung condition than those in the richest areas, due to higher exposure to air pollution, damp, mould,

New Statesman • 4th July 2023

Rosena Allin-Khan: “This is Tory Britain, where we examine patients in cupboards”

When Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London in 2016, Rosena Allin-Khan was flitting between working as an A&E doctor at St George’s Hospital in south London, being a Labour councillor nearby in Wandsworth, and pushing two toddlers around in a pram.

Allin-Khan only stood for the council in 2014 because someone else had dropped out and Labour needed a “paper candidate” – otherwise known as a no-hope candidate – to fill the ballots. She won by a handful of votes in a then-solid Conservative ward.

New Statesman • 16th June 2023

Lindy Cameron: “You can’t retrofit security into AI – it needs to be built in at the start”

Last week, major UK companies including British Airways, Boots and the BBC were hit by a ransomware attack. A Russia-linked criminal gang called Lace Tempest is thought to have been responsible, stealing the personal data of staff via a third-party payroll platform. The group has demanded a ransom, otherwise it will publish sensitive information online – potentially including names, addresses, National Insurance numbers and bank details – by the end of the month.

This high-profile case is no ou

New Statesman • 4th May 2023

Why are women still paying for HRT?

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a treatment that many women rely on to relieve symptoms of the menopause. These can include hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings, a reduced sex drive, vaginal dryness and even osteoporosis, a condition that weakens the bones. But alleviating the effects of female ageing comes at a price.

Until 1 April 2023, women had to pay a standard prescription charge – £9.65 – to access HRT. The length of this prescription was very much dependent on the whims of the do

New Statesman • 29th March 2023

Prescription charges are making people sicker, research shows

Despite NHS care being free, most people still pay for their prescriptions. Some people receive no charge, if they have certain medical conditions or if they are on income-assessed benefits such as Income Support or Universal Credit. However, a report out this month from the Prescription Charges Coalition – a campaign group of 50 organisations chaired by the charity Parkinson’s UK – has found that people with long-term health conditions are being negatively impacted by prescription charges, with

New Statesman • 22nd March 2023

Where’s the hormone-free contraception for women?

Since the creation of the oral contraceptive pill in 1950, the onus for avoiding unwanted pregnancy has been placed on women. Although clinical research into an equivalent for men has taken place, male contraception has yet to materialise.

In February, however, it was revealed that scientists have made a breakthrough in the creation of a male pill. So far it has only been tested on mice, but these experiments show that it could be effective. Unlike female contraceptive pills, it is non-hormonal

New Statesman • 17th March 2023

“The people who have the power lack diversity”

When Felicia Odamtten first joined the civil service she was the only black woman in her team of roughly 40 economists. At university she had noticed a lack of ethnic diversity among academics but was surprised to see it so starkly in the workplace, too.

“It was a culture shock to learn that it was more widespread,” she tells Spotlight. “Growing up in London, I’ve always been around lots of diversity. So going into the workplace, I was like, ‘Where’s it all gone?’ I was just starting out in my

New Statesman • 6th February 2023

Professor Andrew Pollard: Our future depends on the life sciences

During the pandemic, the lightning-fast rollout of Covid vaccines highlighted how vital clinical research is to the world. We depend not only on doctors, nurses and paramedics, but also on scientists to prevent millions of deaths.

The UK was the subject of much of this attention due to the Oxford-AstraZeneca (Oxford-AZ) vaccine. Developed in partnership between Oxford University and the British pharmaceutical giant, the vaccine was distributed to 183 countries, more than all of its competitors.

New Statesman • 6th February 2023

Can “virtual wards” fix the NHS’s state of emergency?

Much like the rest of the NHS, urgent and emergency care in England is in dire straits. Waiting times have soared, beds are scarce, wards are chronically understaffed and health workers are burnt out. This week, as nurses once again go on strike, paramedics, emergency care assistants, call handlers and physiotherapists will be doing the same at a number of trusts.

Recent analysis from the emergency doctors’ professional body, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has found that people