Section: Health

Award-winning film-maker David Wilkinson discovered very recently that he had stage 4 bowel cancer. He has been sharing his experience on Facebook with his friends and admirers, of whom there are very many, including the team here at WCV. We asked if we could publish this post. We believe it’s especially important as we approach […]

A year on from MP Anthony Mangnall’s Brixham meeting: no-one’s laughing at the farce of our water supply. Last April I attended the first of MP Anthony Mangnall’s public meetings with South West Water. They were eventually held right across the constituency, and were much publicised by the MP as an opportunity to ‘hold South […]

“It’s a scandal worse than the Post Office Horizon debacle,” says the retired consultant radiologist who contacted me, urging West Country Voices to look into the use of Physician Associates in the NHS. Plenty of us think we know what’s going on in the NHS. We’ve seen the charts detailing the systematic underfunding. We’ve read […]

In mid-April 2024, the Prime Minister got himself a juicy front cover on the Daily Express: PM tells sick Note Britain: Get a grip and get a job. He then put out a thread on X (formerly Twitter) claiming “We now spend £69bn on benefits for people of working age with a disability or health […]

In the bleak landscape of today’s NHS, a ground-breaking service in a Somerset GP practice is seeing patient and staff satisfaction running at unprecedented highs while reducing pressure on local hospitals. Why, then, is it closing at the end of May, after only four months, and what does the future hold? The GP Urgent Assessment […]

Mr Rishi Sunak, Good afternoon. As I brace myself for my own experiences with the NHS later this afternoon, I couldn’t help but mull over the implications of your latest proposal regarding mental health and fit notes. This latest proposal of yours seems to have spectacularly missed the mark, which to be fair, is how […]

We delivered our 20 hearts to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP) on April 14 2024, to call for an all-at-once rollout of a 20mph speed limit. BCP council is proposing some limited extensions to 20mph areas, like the one currently out for consultation in the Boscombe area. We’re in an environmental emergency and a […]

A recent episode of the hospital drama Casualty misrepresented the very serious risks that Covid still poses. Jane Stevenson wrote to the BBC to explain just how wrong they’d got it. On Saturday 9 March, an episode of Casualty was broadcast, “Trauma”, which created a lot of upset. After reading a robust Twitter/X post by […]

Dear Editor Re: Physician Associates I am writing to give my perspective on the role of physician associates( PAs).  I am a recently retired Consultant Physician who was  involved in the initiation of a PA programme in Devon over 10 years ago. Workforce planning in the NHS is notoriously difficult and an issue that central […]

Our NHS would collapse without migrants. Almost 20 per cent of the staff in NHS England are from overseas. Out of 1.5 million NHS staff in England, around 265,000 reported a non-British nationality as of June 2023. That’s 45,000 more than the previous year. What’s more, since Brexit, data indicates that the proportion of EU citizens working for the […]

Before Johnson gives his evidence we should consider a few things: 1. Just how bad was the UK pandemic response?2. How much could Johnson have affected this?3. What was Johnson’s intent?4. Was there any overt maleficence? 1. How did the UK perform?Badly. For many in the wider public, it will be quite obvious that the UK did very badly indeed. […]

Whitty’s testimony didn’t come with the headline-grabbing revelations of other testimonies, but it was one of the most illuminating of the Inquiry so far, particularly in terms of timeline and where the government properly failed. Here’s my impression of it and some key moments… The first thing to note is just how qualified Whitty is […]

Why this petition matters The petition was started by Seaton resident, Martin Shaw, who explains why it’s needed: The Seaton area community paid half of the cost of building the Hospital in the 1980s. The NHS agreed to own and run it with NHS services for the local community. In 1991, a new wing was […]

This week is turning out to be very revelatory…and shocking. Ed We will update as and when… From 30 October: What we see from the Inquiry is intense focus on the period between Jan 30 and March 23r. This was the nearly two month period that would affect all of our lives so profoundly for […]

Sign the petition here! Back in December 2021, journalist Stefan Simanowitz pulled together a long thread alerting people to the risks to our democracy and data privacy from Palantir, the shadowy data, surveillance and genomics firm (whose founder, right-wing, libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, was a Tump donor and one of the largest donors to the […]

Local activists from Cycling Rebellion have launched the LOVE 20 campaign at Winton Banks in Bournemouth, calling for a 20mph speed limit on Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) roads where citizens live, work, shop and play. Heart shaped spoof 20 miles per hour (mph) speed limit signs were displayed along the road, chalk art brought […]

It was quite a coup for South Hams Society to get Henry Dimbleby to speak on the important issues of food security, food safety and the future of agriculture in this country and the event held in Kingsbridge was well-attended on a chilly Friday night . Also on the panel were the MP for Totnes […]

The problem with the NHS is very simple: there isn’t enough capacity. There aren’t enough GPs, hospital doctors, nurses, physios, OTs, lab techs, radiographers, etc. We currently have less hospital bed capacity than Mexico. We have the second lowest in Europe.  On all metrics, the UK is way behind comparative nations and no where near […]

Teenage author and student Elsie Starr gives a personal insight into dyspraxia Imagine constantly worrying about tripping over, having to overlearn every Maths equation so it sticks in your long-term memory or dreading PE lessons, especially if throwing and catching are involved. Well, this is a reality for many young people, like me, who have […]

Dear Editor, Just as we had started to relax and get our lives ‘back to normal’, 31 July 2023 saw new Covid-19 variants classified in the UK: Covid ‘Eris EG.5.1’ is out there. Hospital admissions are spiking, as a consequence of the poor summer weather (meaning that we have spent more time indoors) and waning […]

The change to cancer targets is a big deal! The issue is the 28-day to diagnosis versus the 2-week wait target. That is, if your GP suspects cancer, from the point of referral, 75 per cent of patients should be diagnosed or given the all clear in 28 days. Currently, if your GP suspects cancer […]

The clean water sign from Shaldon Parish Council based on Environmental Agency data could lead to dangerous decisions. Investigation by Lee Morgan (The PRSD) and Stuart Reynolds, with findings no doubt repeated right around the UK as the sewage scandal deepens. This article first appeared in The PRSD and is reproduced by kind permission of […]

How many people have been nudged, goaded or battered into believing that the NHS is now beyond saving? How many have been nudged, goaded or battered into believing that privatisation for some or all services is the only way forward? What a very clever campaign the Conservatives have fought! How very happy their many private […]

Even on the 75th anniversary of its foundation, the NHS came under assault from the far-right. This article tackles the claims of its detractors and shows how a team of volunteers has taken the argument to Parliament to defend the NHS – and the UK economy. The assault on the NHS When the NHS was […]

Monday was another damning day for the government at the Covid Inquiry. It is becoming clearer what the recommendations from the Inquiry are likely to be… But there is also a bigger question raised about criminality… TUC union, the BMA, the Health Foundation, and The British Red Cross gave evidence. Many of the government defence […]

In the week when the NHS celebrated its 75th birthday, there was an article in The Telegraph  headlined ‘NHS to slash bureaucracy by recruiting doctors and nurses over pen-pushers’. This, of course, led to all the usual clichés about the NHS being full of managers. I thought I’d take a look at what the evidence […]

No doubt we are at a tipping point for the future of healthcare in the UK You will hear a lot of misinformation, disinformation, and barefaced lies over the next 18 months – a £200bn/yr industry is on the table. So here are the facts… Has the NHS been value for money?  Here is the […]

Editor’s comment: Apologies for the duplication of text in places where we have had to use the tweet to capture the video. It was too good and informative a thread to pass up because of technical challenges, so it is a bit of a hybrid. So, Hancock’s first appearance at the Covid Inquiry did not […]

At the end of May 2023, I came across multiple, well-known, anti-vaccine Twitter accounts claiming that new Israeli data showed that there had been “No Known Covid Deaths in Healthy People Under 50.” We know from ONS data that in England and Wales there were 4976 deaths involving Covid-19 in the under-50s since 2020, so […]