Carillion saga continues: Watchdog probes Whitehall salvage attempts on unfinished hospitals October 6, 2019 Britain’s public spending watchdog is to launch in investigation into Whitehall’s attempts to rescue two major hospital projects which ground to a halt when Carillion went bust last year. The unfinished Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool University hospitals were left hanging by a thread when the outsourcer collapsed in January 2018, eventually lumping taxpayers [...]
NHS to receive £250m funding boost for AI development lab August 8, 2019 The NHS is set to receive £250m in funding to boost research into artificial intelligence that could help develop treatments for cancer, dementia and heart disease. The money will be funnelled into a new National Artificial Intelligence Lab, health secretary Matt Hancock said today. Read more: Government to announce emergency £2bn NHS funding injection AI [...]
NHS still running Windows XP on over 2,000 computers despite spate of cyber attacks July 17, 2019 The NHS has admitted it is still running Windows XP on over 2000 computers, even though the operating system stopped receiving security updates five years ago. In a written answer, health minister Jackie Doyle-Price said: “As of July 2019, approximately 2,300 National Health Service computers are using Windows XP from a total of around 1.4 [...]
The NHS needs to plan for today, not 10 years into the future July 4, 2019 The NHS was built with one key purpose: to address social inequality by making the best healthcare available to everyone. For years, that aim has driven technological innovations that power better provision of care. However, as we mark 71 years from when it was founded, the NHS is operating in a very different world – [...]
Tragedy awaits if we don’t bridge the gap between beliefs and reality in the NHS June 26, 2019 A tragic story over the weekend revealed how a man who died of lung cancer was failed abysmally by the NHS. Two separate sets of doctors omitted to tell him for over a year that he had the disease. The added poignancy of the news item was that the victim was a relative of Nye [...]
We turn politics into a deposition at our peril May 30, 2019 Politics is not known as one of the more truthful professions. Spin, exaggeration, and truth-stretching are all staples of the politician’s toolkit. We might prefer it to be otherwise, but the reality is that an astute public must take claims uttered by those in office with a healthy dose of salt. It is therefore worrying [...]
Employers intend to hire despite confidence being at record lows, survey shows May 29, 2019 Employers’ confidence in the UK economy in May stayed close to the record low figure recorded in April, a survey has shown, as the Brexit deadlock continues to weigh on sentiment. Read more: UK wages rise again as employment rate stays at record high Confidence among bosses in making hiring and investment decisions also stayed [...]
Our healthcare system is trapped in an impasse as pharmaceutical firms struggle to fund medical innovations May 1, 2019 The price of technological innovations in health care has once again been brought into focus. Orkambi, a new pharmaceutical treatment for a specific type of cystic fibrosis has not been approved for availability on the NHS because its price is deemed too high. Meanwhile, there is panic at the relentless rise of fatal antibiotic-resistant infections [...]
DEBATE: Should we be concerned about our freedoms as the UK is placed fourth in the Nanny State Index? May 1, 2019 Should we be concerned about our freedoms as the UK is placed fourth in the Nanny State Index? Alex Deane, a Conservative commentator, says YES. The Institute of Economic Affairs is right to criticise the UK by ranking it as one of the least free countries in terms of excessive regulation of alcohol, food, and tobacco. [...]
The anti-vax movement is a symptom of our expert malaise April 26, 2019 The anti-vaccination movement is deadly. According to the charity Unicef, more than half a million UK children were not vaccinated against measles, a highly dangerous but preventable disease, between 2010 and 2017 – which is part of a terrifying global trend. When less than 95 per cent of a population are vaccinated, herd immunity is weakened, [...]