I’m nine. I’m small for my age, but I’m strong. I climb trees. I make dens. I play out all day in the summer, and in the evening I sit in the bath and marvel at the way the scabs …
The dignity of dying at home
My mother liked to tell me stories of medicine at home: how I was born on her bed, and how her own mother had died in hers. Both tales involved family doctors of the old-fashioned sort, with black bags and …
How Big Pharma feeds off the NHS
I used to think, perhaps naively, that even the current Conservative government valued the NHS’s “national treasure” status too much to let it go the way of the debt-fuelled US healthcare system. Now, I’m not so sure: NHS privatisation, by …
Why would anyone envy the NHS?
They say the first step in fixing a crisis is to recognise there is a problem. So let us give thanks for a Labour leader’s dismissal of the belief that Britain’s health service is the envy of the world — …
The slow death of the NHS
Every day, we’re told that the NHS is collapsing. It’s failing the sick and wounded at their hour of greatest need, leaving frail old people lying for hours without an ambulance, farming out patients to care homes, and forcing the …
Sunak’s platitudes won’t save Britain
“The cost of living, too high! Waiting times in the NHS, too long! Illegal migration, far too much!” This could have been Keir Starmer thundering from the Opposition benches. Except it wasn’t. This was Rishi Sunak’s assessment of the government …
Robot Rishi / NHS / The Great Trap / Hugo Talks
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The real NHS maternity scandal
Watching me treat a pregnant patient with a minor injury in A&E, one of my medical students asked me for some careers advice. She was most interested in obstetrics, she told me, but was worried about the recent controversies that …
Violence rules my A&E ward
I’ve seen everything on my A&E ward: from staff, police officers and members of the public being punched to full-on brawls breaking out. Even visibly pregnant staff are not immune to aggression. And that’s just in a fortnight: people don’t …
My A&E survives on death
A few nights ago, during the graveyard shift in A&E, a colleague sent me a clip from the classic BBC sitcom, Yes, Prime Minister. “The Smoking Ban” episode shows PM Jim Hacker vowing to take on the tobacco lobby — …
The surgeons exploiting trans misery
It’s never been easy to get gender reassignment surgery on the NHS. More than a decade ago, when I was living in Birmingham, I was referred by a psychiatrist to a Gender Identity Clinic in London. NHS England funded seven …
Don’t go to A&E
It’s just before 8am on Monday morning, and my A&E department is heaving. I’ve been on-call all weekend — I’m shattered — but I don’t have time to dwell on it. Our traffic light system is a sea of red: …
Why the Tavistock won’t talk to me
For my day job, I interview celebrities, and here’s what you do if you want to interview a celebrity: you call up their press officer and pitch the piece you have in mind. The press officer checks if you have …
Inside Britain’s psychiatric nightmare
There were still grim Victorian-era asylums dotted around Britain when Penelope Campling started out as a young psychiatrist almost 40 years ago. She began her career in The Towers, one of two such places in Leicester. It was bleak: filled …
The return of Covid fearmongering
The usual suspects have been out in force demanding greater health restrictions as the story of rising covid cases is peddled through the media. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been urging governments to employ “tried and tested measures” such …
