Tag Archives: illness

Cost of dying reaches record high in UK – and here’s a practical example of help

If you don’t have £10,000 saved up to pay for the cost of your own death, your survivors will be stuck with a hefty bill, it seems.

Here’s The Independent:

According to SunLife’s annual report looking at the growing expenses for the bereaved, the average cost has soared to £9,658. This figure, which includes the price of a funeral, professional fees and other send-off costs, is the highest in the 20 years SunLife has been tracking them.

A basic funeral in the UK, which includes a burial or cremation, all funeral director fees, a mid-range coffin, one funeral limousine, as well as doctor and celebrant fees, have increased to £4,141 from £3,953 last year.

A hike in send-off costs to £2,768 and in professional fees to £2,749 means the overall cost of dying is up £458 year on year.

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The pressure of rising funeral costs has left one in five families experiencing “notable financial concerns”.

Among these, three-quarters of people reported that paying for the funeral impacted their mental health, and two-thirds experienced an impact on their physical health.

Now let’s hear from Susan Bradley, who lost both her mother and sister within 10 months – as also reported in The Independent:

The 51-year-old from Birmingham was devastated when her mother passed away on 9 June 2022 following a stroke and further complications.

The emotional distress of her grief was only intensified by the stress of having to scrape together money for the funeral costs.

The total expenses with Central Co-op Funeral amounted to £4,800, which was to be split between six relatives.

The 51-year-old said she had to be “extra careful” with money and was forced to neglect some of her long-standing payments.

After struggling through her mother’s funeral costs, Ms Bradley was faced with another tragedy – her sister’s sudden passing at the age of 37 in April last year.

The bill for her sister’s funeral increased by £1,000 from that of her mother’s the previous year.

Here comes the helpful bit:

With her carer’s allowance her only income, plus the additional costs of taking in her sister’s two children, Ms Bradley reached out for help to cover the costs of the funeral.

She googled until she found Down to Earth, a UK-wide helpline offering advice and practical support to people struggling with funeral costs.

Down to Earth made an application for Ms Bradley to charity Turn2us who awarded the family £1,980 towards the funeral. They also directed Ms Bradley to Teaching Staff Trust, who provide hardship grants to help people in or previously involved in the education sector through times of financial trouble.

The trust helped the family cover the majority of the remaining expenses of the funeral, significantly reducing the burden for Ms Bradley’s family.

According to the article, people facing spiralling funeral costs are increasingly failing to either heat or eat. They find they are unable to do what the deceased person wanted or what they feel is right to honour that person and it makes some people mentally, emotionally, and physically very ill.

With government help dwindling down to nothing, in real terms – and no surprises there – it is fortunate that these charitable organisations exist to pick up the slack.

But how many of us even know they exist? And will demand for their help rocket beyond their ability, now that we know they do?

Source: Sunlife report: Cost of dying reaches record high in UK, new report reveals | The Independent


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Are we ignoring the dangerous effects of Long Covid?

Rampant: the Covid-19 virus is once again on the loose across the UK because the Tories haven’t just lost control; they’ve deliberately thrown it away.

Apparently we should be concerned about excess mortality and declining life expectancy, in young people, that is attributable to Covid-19.

This is to do with Long Covid; apparently there may be a large number of youngsters disabled by Covid, or suffering vascular disease, or dying, in the months after suffering acute Covid.

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Here’s epidemiologist Colin Furness:

It’s an interesting question because This Writer doesn’t think it has been asked: what is Covid-19 doing to us now?

And will we be able to find out?


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Triathlon championship contestants fall ill after swimming in polluted water. Who pays?

A prediction that has come true: water discharged into rivers and seas isn’t expected to be drunk. But it has been – and it was full of raw, untreated sewage because the government has allowed privatised water firms to avoid the expense of purifying this water. Will that decision come back to haunt the politicians and the water tycoons now people have become ill?

This should be self-explanatory:

The allegation is clear: people participating in the World Triathlon Championship Series in Sunderland have fallen ill after swimming in waters that have been found unexpectedly to have been polluted.

Swimmers complained that they were swimming “in shit”.

The local privatised water firm has denied any responsibility – but who else would have been capable of doing it?

This could be a crucial test case, regarding the continued – government-supported – pollution of the UK’s waterways with raw sewage.

It seems the UK’s Tory government, by allowing the privatised water firms to avoid their responsibility to purify water before releasing it back into the environment, has actively supported the infection of the nation’s citizens with disease.

It occurs to This Writer that, if evidence can be found linking the swimmers’ illnesses with the release of contaminated water by the company, then the organisers of the event – and the individual swimmers – would have a strong case for compensation against both the firm and the UK’s government.

Taking it further – if such a case is won, the Tory MPs who supported dumping raw sewage into the UK’s waterways won’t be too badly inconvenienced; it will be the public – those their decision has harmed – who will pay the legal bill and any fines.

But we should all remember it at election time. Right?

Oh look – here’s visual evidence of what’s happening all around our coasts right now:


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Mental illness days taken by civil servants rise 38% in one year and here’s the reason

Is it any surprise that Whitehall civil servants took a record 661,433 sick days due to mental health last year – 38 per cent more than the already-phenomenal 558,125 of the year before?

Labour says data reveals ‘mental health crisis at the heart of Whitehall’, as unions blame staff cuts, low pay and long hours.

The figures show that the amount of mental health-related sick leave across the heart of government has been rising continuously for the past decade.

Civil servants at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) took the most sick days for mental health in 2021-22 – a total of 280,597. Staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) took off almost as much time – 236,365 days – while the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had the third-highest total, at 88,723 days.

Unions representing Whitehall workers blamed the rising numbers on increased workloads, the impact of Covid-19, staff cuts, low pay, long hours and poor morale.

And the unions are exactly right.

The Tories cut public service pay as soon as they could after taking office – by freezing it for several years at a time (if I recall correctly). So already these employees were being placed under increasing stress because they were finding it harder to make ends meet – and this has become progressively worse.

Staff has been cut back hard, meaning workloads have increased, meaning those who remain are having to work longer hours to hit their targets – if possible.

Oh, and we are told that Tory government ministers have developed a fondness for mistreating their staff as well.

Result: low morale.

Roll all that together and you have a dangerous concoction that is likely to harm the mentality of anybody forced to partake of it.

There is a solution – but it is not one that would occur to a Tory.

You simply employ enough staff to get the job done within normal working hours, and pay them a salary that adequately compensates them for the time they put in and the expertise they bring to the work.

And instead of berating them for failure, you make sure that they are praised for success.

Not only will morale and mental health improve, meaning fewer days’ work will be lost due to illness, but the quality of the work will improve and the people carrying it out will want to stay in the job – because they’re good at it, it’s rewarding and the atmosphere is welcoming.

That’s how you motivate a workforce and keep its members healthy.

But it will never happen under a Conservative government.

Source: Mental health sick days taken by civil servants rise 38% in one year | Civil service | The Guardian

Three-fifths of Britons are worried about the cost of living. ‘Welcome to our world,’ say benefit claimants

Boris the bung: Johnson has been splurging cash on the very rich for the last three years. Now, when the rest of us are suffering in a cost-of-living crisis he created, he has little for us other than excuses.

Remember when only benefit claimants had to choose between “eating and heating” – buying food for their families or energy for their homes?

Those were happy days for the small-minded Little Britons who merrily voted Tory government after Tory government into power to continue ruining the economy and siphoning cash away from people who need it.

Now, more than 60 per cent of the UK’s population are in the same position as those benefit claimants – and suddenly it isn’t quite as amusing to fling the old “scrounger” accusations around any more, is it?

Many of the same people who supported government benefit cuts that drove claimants to suicide or simply starved them to death are now begging the same government to support them through the current cost-of-living crisis.

And some – not necessarily the same ones – are having suicidal thoughts themselves.

This Writer has a certain amount of sympathy for those who didn’t vote Tory and never supported the victimisation of the vulnerable.

Those who did are finding it isn’t so comfortable when the shoe’s on the other foot, I suppose. I wonder whether they will learn from the experience, to be a little less judgmental about other people, now they have suffered just a little of what the sick and disabled (for example) have endured for more than a decade?

Well, the experience won’t do them any good if they give in to their more grim thoughts, so it is right that everybody who is suffering mental ill-health as a result of the government’s failure in its most basic function – providing affordable food and energy to the population – should get treatment for it.

Sadly (again) we have a government that is not up to the task.

The Tories are using the crisis to provide another subsidy for the rich, with people who own multiple houses set to receive £400 for each of them, no matter whether they are occupied all the time or not.

Landlords will be under no obligation to pass the cash on to tenants who actually pay the bills.

And mental health services have long been neglected by successive Conservative governments.

Now they are scrabbling to catch up, providing £2.3 billion extra per year to treat two million more people – that’s just £1,150 each for around 1/20 of those who need help, according to the Sky News poll.

And they have called for evidence from the public about what should be in a 10-year plan for mental health, that will not make any difference to people who are in need now.

Thomas Jefferson (or was it Benjamin Franklin?) once famously said, “We get the government we deserve.”

I just hope people who are going through hardship now realise that their choice of Tory rule has inflicted the same – and worse – on others for many years.

Source: ‘I can’t take the cost of living anymore’: We asked Britons how the crisis is affecting them

Are you one of the 340,000 PIP claimants who could be owed £16,000 in back pay?

The Department for Work and Pensions has announced that it will be checking 340,000 Personal Independence Payment claims to see if back-payments of £16,000 or more are owed – mostly to claimants with a mental health condition.

The initiative follows – extremely belatedly – a court decision from July 2019, finding that the DWP had not been awarding the correct number of points to some claimants who need prompting or social support to engage with other people face-to-face.

According to Benefits and Work,

Amongst PIP claimants who may have missed out are:

People who have regular meetings with a mental health professional, without which they would not be able to manage face to face encounters;

People who need the input of particular friends or relatives with experience of supporting them in social situations – rather than just any well-meaning friend or relative – to help them manage face to face encounters.

The DWP is not planning to invite claimants for an assessment but may contact them for more information.

This means a brown envelope from the DWP will arrive, out of the blue, through the letterboxes of people who are likely to have a phobia about brown envelopes from government departments.

The most likely outcome from people who are contacted in this way is that the letters will be ignored.

So This Writer is happy to endorse the suggestion, by Benefits and Work, that anyone who believes they may be affected should contact the DWP proactively – get in touch with them without giving them time to get in touch with you.

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Mythbusting: nurse(?) makes mistake over ‘Do Not Resuscitate’

Ventilator: people with long-term illnesses, disabilities and learning disabilities are still being denied resuscitation by the NHS – and one nurse, at least, has denied the existence of this scandal.

I can’t let this pass.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on June 16, Peterborough’s Tory MP Paul Bristow asked an important question about “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) orders that have been made on NHS patients during the Covid-19 crisis.

Having reported on this scandal many times on This Site, I tweeted in response:

I was surprised and saddened when this provoked the following response from a Twitter user who identifies as a nurse (I won’t reproduce the tweet here because I do not wish to identify that person):

“Are you a healthcare professional?

“No.

“Then do not spread false theories about something you obviously know nothing about.”

I attempted to put my critic straight – as politely as possible, in the circumstances:

“I am a news reporter of nearly 30 years experience and have been covering this story from the start. I DO know the facts here. And I see that, since you provide no information to support your insult, you probably don’t. Go well.”

Sadly, this person would not take the (rather overt) hint and came back at me:

You have confirmed it.

It is a story.

I do not have the time, inclination or room on twitter to “provide you with information” only to say that I have 30 years experience as a nurse and have a postgraduate qualification in Professional Practice

Then this is a person who ought to have known better. The claim, “It is a story,” was an attempt to downplay the DNR deaths as fiction, and I wasn’t having that. Also the refusal to support a claim with factual information is a classic tactic by trolls who don’t have any facts to offer.

So I responded (again):

“And how does that better qualify you to comment on this? I’ve done the research so I know my facts. It isn’t fiction.”

And again this person came back at me:

Ok then would you attempt CPR on a five stone frail old woman? Am not going to carry on with this because I’m afraid you just don’t know what you’re on about

This is misleading, and a lie. Allow me to explain.

Mr Bristow’s question is available  to read in Hansard, here. He said: “Last year, doctors and care settings issued an unprecedented number of “do not resuscitate” orders to patients with learning disabilities and mental illness. Many were unlawful and caused avoidable deaths.

“Despite urgent Care Quality Commission and NHS guidance, shockingly, this practice has continued. Last week, The Telegraph reported that Sonia Deleon died unresuscitated. Her family said she was given a DNR without them knowing, and with her learning disabilities and schizophrenia stated as reasons.

“Does the Prime Minister share my alarm about these cases, which should have no place in our care, and does he agree that they should be independently investigated?”

I won’t bother to repeat Boris Johnson’s response as he made no undertaking to prevent further abuses of DNR orders.

It was clear that the issue here was not the safety of attempting cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on a person who may suffer as much harm in that attempt as by the condition that had caused them to need reviving.

It was a political choice to deny health care to people dying with Covid-19, because they have learning (or other) disabilities. It seems to have been considered an opportunity to clear many thousands of so-called “useless eaters” from the UK’s benefit books.

Sonia Deleon’s story is a classic example; you can read about it here.

In brief, almost a year after it was revealed that a policy was in place to deny NHS Covid-19 care to people with long-term illnesses and disabilities – and NHS bosses then claimed to have warned hospitals, GPs and NHS managers not to make such orders on these people, Sonia Deleon was deliberately allowed to die because a DNR order on her had been made.

Hospital authorities claimed that it the order had been agreed with Ms Deleon’s family but they deny this strenuously.

Ms Deleon had learning disabilities and the circumstances of her death are not only a scandal in themselves but are a continuation of a national disgrace.

And I was criticised for highlighting this atrocity – by someone claiming to be a nurse.

I won’t take this matter further by seeking to identify the NHS trust for which this person works and requesting that they be reminded of the facts and properly disciplined for trying to mislead the public. I may change my mind if any further attempts at deception result from this article.

But I will take the opportunity to request that anybody who has relatives living with a long-term illness or disability, or a learning disability, should contact the NHS and ensure that orders equivalent to death sentences have not been applied to their loved ones without their knowledge.

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Universal Credit causes mental illness – but won’t get you a new job, study finds

A study of Universal Credit has found that it increases mental illness in claimants while failing to get them into new employment.

The finding should cause huge concern among the two million people who are said to have signed up for the benefit after the Conservative government imposed its coronavirus-prompted lockdown, forcing them to sign onto the benefit when their incomes disappeared.

The study of able-bodied people (those with disabilities have already been shown to suffer adverse effects due to changes in their benefits) found a 6.57 per cent increase in psychological distress.

This led the study’s authors to estimate that an extra 63,674 people suffered psychological distress between 2013 and 2018, as a result of being put on Universal Credit.

They estimated that 21,760 might reach the diagnostic threshold for depression.

They believe that, although the effect sizes identified are moderate, the potential for psychological impact is substantial owing to the widespread national policy implementation.

Levels of distress remained constant for people who were not put on the new benefit.

The study revealed that there was no increase in the transition into employment amongst those on Universal Credit, compared with those who were not – despite this being the key rationale given for its introduction.

The Tory government has commissioned its own evaluation of Universal Credit – but this will focus on labour market outcomes and not assess the effect on health and wellbeing.

Won’t it be interesting to see whether this study finds an improvement in employment?

Source: Universal Credit mental health problems, but not employment

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Coronavirus doubles deaths in mental health hospitals. How did it get in?

The number of deaths in mental health hospitals has doubled since the same time last year because of the coronavirus. Why?

These are supposed to be very secure facilities.

The number of people visiting them should have fallen because of the lockdown.

And medical professionals should have had the equipment – and the knowledge – to prevent the virus from penetrating as far as the patients.

But out of 106 deaths between March 1 and May 1, 54 were from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 infections.

In the same period last year, 51 people died. So deaths have more than doubled and all but one of the excess deaths were due to the pandemic.

And if you think the problem is limited to mental health hospitals, ask yourself: why is NHS England refusing to admit the number of people with learning disabilities who have died?

The Care Quality Commission has reminded mental health hospital providers that they have a duty of care to vulnerable patients.

It has highlighted its fears over the spread of the virus in secure hospitals and units, and to patients who are under Mental Health Act restrictions in the community.

The CQC will review its information on the deaths to determine what may be driving the deaths and whether other action should be taken.

There are serious human rights questions to be answered:

Deborah Coles, from the charity Inquest, told The Independent: “The refusal to publish the data points to the historical longstanding failure to provide detailed information about deaths of people in the care of the state in mental health and learning disability settings.

“People in closed institutions are completely reliant on others for their care and treatment. At a time of no external scrutiny, because the CQC is not inspecting units and family visits are restricted, there is the ever-present risk of abuse and ill treatment. These organisations have clear human rights obligations and it is unacceptable that there is just no transparency about what is happening.”

She added: “The other key issue is the indirect impact of Covid-19 on therapeutic services, use of restraint, medication and seclusion and self-inflicted deaths. They need to publish more comprehensive data than numbers disaggregated by gender, race, age, provider. Such a dramatic increase in deaths is deeply concerning and we need to understand the context. Data is meaningless without analysis.”

This Writer wants to know if our health providers have a guilty conscience.

Have they deliberately overlooked their duties to ensure that people with mental illnesses and learning disabilities enjoy a decent standard of health?

Let’s be honest with ourselves – if people in authority are trying to hide something, it’s usually because they know they’re responsible.

Lastly: nobody in such a position knowingly fails in their duty of their own accord. Were they acting (or rather, not acting) on orders from the Tory government?

Source: Coronavirus: Deaths in mental health hospitals double as Covid-19 spreads | The Independent

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People with mental illnesses and disabilities may be falling foul of video court hearings

Court: moving hearings to audio/video because of the coronavirus has made them useless for some people, due to their disabilities. (How many of your are going to criticise me over the fact that UK courts don’t use the gavel?)

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has called for the government to collect information on the effect of video court hearings on people with mental illnesses and other conditions.

It is feared that people with conditions including learning disability, autism spectrum disorders and mental health conditions – who are significantly over-represented in the criminal justic system – are at a disadvantage when cases are conducted without them being present in court.

The Ministry of Justice has switched magistrates’ hearings to video sessions in response to the coronavirus lockdown, with 85 per cent of cases heard in England and Wales this month carried out using audio and video technology.

Defendants have complained that they did not have enough time to discuss their cases with lawyers, and that they could not hear or understand what was going on during their hearing.

The EHRC has said that everyone should be equal before the law, and this means nobody defending themselves before a court should be at a disadvantage because they are disabled.

Will the government pay attention? It seems unlikely.

Tories have victimised people with disabilities since the moment they got back into office in 2010 – imposing harsh restrictions on who could receive state benefits, and demonising people claiming those benefits as shirkers and scroungers.

They have already made it hard for people to take a benefit case through to a legal tribunal; but the majority of cases that then succeed suggest that it is only logical that they would want to make it harder for a disabled person to achieve a victory, in any court situation.

Perhaps my opinion is over-judgemental.

So we shall have to judge the government by what it does.

If we never hear about this issue again, we’ll have our answer – and it won’t be good.

Source: Court hearings via video ‘risk unfairness for disabled people’ | UK news | The Guardian

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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