We all know what GPs used to look like. Mostly men with beards, they made house calls, wore tweed jackets and carried their patient notes around in battered Lloyd George envelopes. Those days have largely disappeared. Home visits are now rare, many practices no longer have a single full-time partner, and patients are often more … Read more
The Trump administration has made MAHA – Make America Healthy Again one of its defining domestic initiatives. The movement promises to tackle chronic disease, improve diets and reverse the decline in Americans’ health. Some of its proposals have attracted widespread criticism and may well make matters worse. Central to the MAHA world view is the … Read more
The pharmaceutical agreement between the UK and the United States was signed last year, but it has suddenly become politically controversial. Incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham is under pressure to cancel or renegotiate it. The broad bargain was straightforward. The deal has returned to the headlines because of a paper published in the British Medical … Read more
UK ministers are reportedly considering triggering a break clause in Palantir’s £330 million contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). The clause, available from February 2027, would allow the government to exit the seven-year deal early. The review follows mounting pressure from the British Medical Association, MPs and campaign groups, who have raised concerns … Read more
If you wanted to design a policy that looks like it fixes the NHS workforce crisis without actually fixing it, you might end up with something very like the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026. The Act requires the NHS to prioritise UK-trained doctors when allocating foundation and specialty training posts. In plain English: British graduates … Read more
Ending HIV: How Public Health Quietly Delivered One of Britain’s Biggest Successes For most of my adult life, HIV has been treated as a permanent fact of modern life: tragic, manageable, but ultimately ineradicable. Something you mitigate, not solve. That assumption is now wrong. The UK is on track to eliminate new HIV transmissions by … Read more
I’ve been overweight for about 30 years. Or at least, I’ve been over the “correct” BMI for my height. I doubt I’ll ever hit the official ideal weight on the NHS tables — and honestly, I don’t care. If anything, what I illustrate is that the definitions of what is and isn’t a healthy weight … Read more
One of my old PCT colleagues died a couple of weeks back. A North East GP who was a staunch advocate of clinical leadership. If you have half an eye on the news, you’ll know something big is happening inside the NHS. But the scale of the NHS reforms 2025 is still flying under the … Read more
At 4pm on the 17th of December 1992, Jonathan Zito was stabbed to death by a stranger at a London Underground station. This wasn’t an isolated tragedy. From the 1980s onwards, Conservative governments emptied Britain’s mental hospitals and moved thousands of patients into “the community” — but without providing the support or services they needed. … Read more
This week, the government launched its long-awaited 10-year plan for the NHS. At 165 pages, it’s a dense, managerial, and thoroughly technocratic document—very on brand for a government that wants to appear serious and reformist, while hoping most people won’t read past the executive summary. There are three main themes: It’s a top-down, big-state programme … Read more