NHS: will astronomical energy price rises create health problems – physical and mental – that could overwhelm the health service in the coming winter?
NHS leaders have warned that the rising cost of energy bills may trigger a humanitarian crisis that their organisation will be left to handle, if the government doesn’t do more to help.
The vertiginous rise in the price of energy may leave millions of people forced to choose between heating their homes and having enough food to eat – and this is likely to have consequences for their health, the NHS Confederation said.
Cold homes are already linked to 10,000 deaths per year; cold conditions can lead to a rise in respiratory conditions, and in older people can also increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and falls.
This winter, those problems would increase the strain on the NHS, whose bosses are already expecting to have to cope with flu, norovirus and Covid outbreaks.
And there would also be a major impact on mental health and well-being.
The government has protested that it is taking action over energy prices and that it is supporting the NHS.
But the payments of £400 to households in England, Scotland and Wales, rising to £1,200 for the poorest, were announced before it was predicted that energy costs may rise to around £4,200 per year.
The government also said it was working with the NHS to make sure it can accommodate winter pressures, including increasing the number of hospital beds available and recruiting staff from foreign countries.
No further action is to be taken until the new prime minister – either Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss – is sworn in next month.
Considering the warning from the NHS Confederation, is the current offer too little? And will any extra help arrive too late?
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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.
Warburton: he’s accused of sexual improprieties and drug abuse – as apparently suggested by this image (although what the white lines really were has yet to be determined).
I wouldn’t want to cast suspicion on a person who has been admitted to hospital, allegedly suffering from stress.
That’s what we’re being told about David Warburton, after he was suspended from the Parliamentary Conservative Party amid a torrent of allegations about inappropriate sexual behaviour and cocaine abuse:
On Sunday, he was admitted to hospital suffering from “severe shock and stress”, according to his wife Harriet, who is also his office manager.
Government whips … have told the MP to stay away from Westminster while the investigation is ongoing, although they have no power to ban him from the parliamentary estate.
But isn’t that exactly what a person accused of such offences might do, if he was trying to curry sympathy?
We mustn’t pre-judge – especially not with Warburton’s Somerton and Frome constituency being a key battleground in next months local government elections, with elections for every seat on the county council.
No, we mustn’t pre-judge.
But we can ask why we were told he’s gone into hospital. He could have simply stepped back from politics until the investigation was completed – whether in hospital or not. Why tell us this?
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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.
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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Money-making scam: The idea was to make your confidential health information public knowledge, in order to make money for private health firms (some of which are from the United States).
This is a victory for people power.
You remember your Tory government’s plan to give away your personal – private – health records to marauding health companies so they can profit from them?
The plan that keeps surfacing every few years and keeps getting batted back by a UK public that wants this material to stay confidential?
Well, we’ve just succeeded in stopping it again. For the time being, at least.
The current attempt started in May, when NHS Digital announced that, if you lived in England, it would be putting the private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits onto disc and handing them to “third parties”. Almost nobody noticed.
The plan provided an opportunity for patients to opt out – if they did so by a deadline of June 23, which was ridiculously fast. It seems clear that the intention was to pass your information over before you even knew it was happening.
And then organisations like This Site became involved.
Now we see that, after 107,429 people opted out in May, when nobody knew about it, 1,275,153 did so in June – around 12 times as many people.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons and the opt-out deadline was extended to September – and now the scheme is being withdrawn altogether, albeit temporarily, according to NHS Digital.
May we conclude that even more millions of people opted out during July and the first weeks of August?
But NHS Digital is not abandoning the scheme altogether – just pausing it, with no new launch date. Here’s The Observer:
It will soon start a “listening exercise” and consultation process before launching a public information campaign.
Who will be told about it?
In a major concession to critics, patients will now be allowed to opt out at any stage, with their data deleted even if it has already been uploaded.
Am I the only one with doubts about that? If it has already been provided to private firms, there’s nothing to stop them from taking that information off the database and keeping it in a form of their own. If they know it may be altered, they probably will.
NHS Digital is also pledging to increase the security and privacy of the data, even while researchers are working with it.
I do not believe this.
There is a fundamental dishonesty that goes to the heart of this scheme, and it is the lie that private firms care about your health more than their profits.
Private firms were allowed to run NHS services for profit soon after the David Cameron coalition government came into office, in a change supported by many Tory MPs who had shares in those firms.
The plan to give your confidential information to those private firms was first tried very soon after that, in 2013. To me, this was evidence that the Tory plan all along had been to make money for profit-grubbers and not to improve healthcare.
The public has batted it away time and time again since then, but time and time again the Tories have brought it back.
Their latest claim is that
“Patient data is vital to healthcare planning and research. It is being used to develop treatments for cancer, diabetes, long Covid and heart disease, and to plan how NHS services recover from Covid.”
That’s why they want to take away our right to privacy and confidentiality and I don’t believe a word of it. How can it be used to develop these treatments when we haven’t handed it over? And how have these treatments been developed in the past?
The simple fact is that it is our information – not theirs. And if we don’t want it to be shared, there’s nothing they can do about it.
You’ll be aware that the Tories had been planning to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers without telling you.
They had created a scam scheme in which they would hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million NHS England patients to profit-making organisations – unless the patients opted out.
But they never actually bothered to tell anybody what they were doing.
Instead, people found out through sites like this one – and kicked up such an outcry that the government announced it was delaying the data upload from the beginning of July to the beginning of September.
Announcing the delay, Health Minister Jo Churchill said ministers would use the extra time to “talk to doctors, patients and charities to strengthen the plan… and ensure data is accessed securely”.
I have no idea whether any of this has actually happened.
The message to Mr Thomas makes it clear that the government hasn’t been talking to patients, despite the assurance that it would.
It also suggests very strongly that whatever the government has been doing, it has made a liar of Ms Churchill.
So the action taken by his GP practice to opt all patients out seems entirely appropriate and I would urge anybody in England who has not received any communication about the plan from the government to contact your own GP practice and ask for it to do the same.
It’s what I’d be doing if I lived in England.
Friendly advice: This is important. Do it now – and don’t rely on anyone else to do it for you.
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This is a victory for social media campaigners like This Site.
The Tories had been planning to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers without telling you.
They had created a scam scheme in which they would hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million NHS England patients to profit-making organisations – unless the patients opted out.
But they never actually bothered to tell anybody what they were doing.
I mean: if you’re in England, did you see the national advertising campaign on TV, the social media and in the newspapers? Did you catch the news spots with NHS and government representatives debating it with some of the many organisations who oppose it?
I didn’t think so.
Yet Health Minister Jo Churchill, announcing the “delay” in Parliament, had the bare-faced cheek to say the government was “absolutely determined to take people with us”.
The impression I get is that hardly anybody knew a single thing about it until Vox Political – along with a few other social media organisations – publicised it on June 2.
By then, less than three weeks were left before the original June 23 deadline for opting out.
So it was risible when Churchill told Parliament “patients own their own data”.
If that’s an admission that the Tories don’t own patient data, then why have they been trying to sell it ever since they formed their government in 2010? Isn’t that, you know, theft?
The good news is that This Site’s article – and those of the other social media sites that took an interest – caught the public interest and the government had to step back.
The Tories wouldn’t have announced this delay if they had not received significant resistance to their plan.
And the really good news is that the delay means more people can opt out of the scheme.
You can do this by providing this online form to your GP – or by using this website. I strongly urge you to do so.
Be sure to enjoy the “mythbusting” section of the website in which the Tories say it’s all perfectly innocent. And then ignore it.
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Readers in England: are you happy that the Tory government is about to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers?
Tory-run NHS Digital will hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million patients to “third parties” to “support the planning and commissioning of health and care services, the development of health and care policy, public health monitoring and interventions (including COVID-19) and enable many different areas of research.”
The announcement is carefully worded to avoid suggesting that your details are going to people who plan to make money out of them, but the simple fact is that, before privatisation was introduced in 2012, nobody but the NHS would have needed your records for the reasons given.
You can opt out of the scheme before June 23 by providing this online form to your GP – or by using this website. I strongly urge you to do so – and to ignore the “mythbusting” section of the website in which the Tories say it’s all perfectly innocent. They would, wouldn’t they?
If you think the Tories can be trusted on this, bear in mind that NHS Digital said the data could not be used “solely for commercial purposes”, which means that it will be used partly for commercial purposes.
And campaigners have also raised concerns that the scheme has not been sufficiently publicised. Did you know about it before reading this?
Healthcare IT News quoted Phil Booth of privacy organisation MedConfidential as follows:
“For the Government to rush out a data grab like this, with only a few weeks’ notice for patients and for GPs, is not only corrosive of trust – it’s deeply irresponsible. GPs are the busiest they’ve ever been and dumping this on them without time to prepare and the resources to handle patients’ opt-outs is the very worst sort of digital disruption.”
Absolutely.
NHS Digital is desperate to convince us that the data could only be used by “organisations which can show they have an appropriate legal basis and a legitimate need to use it”.
But recent experiences of health secretary Matt Hancock’s dealings with the private sector suggest that the database will go to anybody who has bunged the Tory Party a few quid over the last 10 or 20 years.
And, let’s face it, the Tories have a very poor record of trying to sell off your NHS records for a quick buck.
It’s one of the stories that has kept repeating over the last (nearly) 10 years, and This Site has reported on its progress:
The Tories tried to put GP records in a central database in 2013 under the Care.data programme, but it was abandoned in 2016 after confidentiality complaints.
My report of the time shows that the Tories are still using the same weak excuse for exploiting your private data, that failed to convince anyone eight years ago:
[Then-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt] thinks this gross abuse of patient confidentiality is a good idea. But then, he’s a Tory and therefore thinks he has a God-given right to take anything, from anyone, if they have less filthy lucre than himself.
According to the Daily Mail – and you know the Tories have lost the plot when even the Heil weighs in against them – the *unt wants us to believe that the information will be valuable for medical research and screening for common diseases.
Doctors say Mr *unt and NHS England have failed in their duty to publicise the plan in a proper and reasonable way, that patients are not getting an “informed” choice about the matter, and that patients could be identified from the data with any information other than that on common conditions – which, we’ve already established, becomes public knowledge anyway.
Same excuses, same failure to publicise the plan… so we have all the same reasons to withdraw our permission. Don’t we?
And in 2016, after a review into care.data recommended that the scheme be scrapped, the Tories tried to sell your information anyway, but just without telling you.
The government’s review proposes to allow medical records from your family doctor, (possibly including NHS Numbers, diagnoses, referrals, prescriptions along with postcodes and dates of birth) to be uploaded to a giant national database – but this time without telling us or asking for our consent.
One of the schemes to replace care.data is called the “Single GP dataset”. The government’s review into care.data proposes to send all patient records from family GPs to the central database without the express consent of patients. Once in the system, it can be “sold” to any customers of the ‘Health and Social Care Information centre”, including private companies.
The government buried this announcement on the day of the report into the Iraq War. It is hoping no one will notice this new land grab on our medical records.
But people did notice.
And now I’m reporting on it again, so you will notice it again. I hope you will put a stop to it again, too.
And then I’ll look forward to reporting on another Tory bid to sell this information.
Judging by experience, we’ll be back here again in 2025.
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Despair: a lack of emergency hospital beds – due to Covid-19? – has had a knock-on effect on people who are mentally-ill, leading to deaths.
This is information I found before having to work on the Riley lawsuit.
The underlying story is clear: people with mental illnesses are being indirectly threatened by government/health service policy during the Covid-19 crisis; they are considered expendable – or they are not considered at all.
The Conservatives in government have known that the NHS was not prepared for a pandemic illness like Covid-19 since Operation Cygnus reported that such an event would overwhelm the health service. That was in 2016/17. They did nothing.
Now the consequences are making themselves felt. And it seems the Tories aren’t bothered. Why should they be?
They aren’t suffering.
A lack of emergency hospital beds for the mentally ill has led to one killing and a spate of suicides, an investigation reveals.
The tragedies happened after patients were turned away because NHS bosses failed to follow legislation to admit urgent cases immediately.
The British Medical Association probe found some had to wait up to a month for hospital admission – and many of the Clinical Commissioning Groups responsible for carrying out the Mental Health Act rule did not record the long waiting times.
In one case, paranoid schizophrenia sufferer Kierran Fletcher, 29, killed a grandad in a frenzied attack.
It was 24 hours after Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust put him in a queue with 23 others.
Coroners linked 11 deaths in a year, including suicides, to pressures on the Trust’s mental health services.
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The health minister who is so stupid she said the November lockdown in England could only have been predicted with a crystal ball has struck again.
There’s a reason we call Nadine Dorries “Mad Nad”.
Over the weekend, the woman widely considered to be the stupidist Tory MP – against stiff competition! – admitted that she did not understand the information being received and used by her own department of government; SAGE had demanded a lockdown in September.
Now she has demonstrated that she does not understand that her government’s failure to get to grips with the Covid crisis in any meaningful way over a period of nearly a year is having a devastating effect on the mental health of people working in the NHS and in the care sector.
Labour MP Doctor Rosena Allin-Khan does – and appealed to Dorries no fewer than eight times to join with her in devising a mental health package that has cross-party support. Dorries rejected it in a manner that belittled not only herself but her entire miserable government:
I asked Nadine Dorries 8 times last night, if she would meet me and work cross-party, to discuss a mental health support package for frontline NHS and Care staff.
Given how many times the Government have asked for cross-party support – her response is completely shocking. pic.twitter.com/RJRWrYsiz8
We have a cabinet full of cocksure, deluded amateurs instead of brains, integrity or expertise. And that’s because the likes of the phenomenally f**king thick Nadine Dorries were taken on in the first place for one reason & one reason alone: their rabid fetish for a hard Brexit. https://t.co/9tyPuN2WhQ
This video actually made me feel a bit sick. @DrRosena trying to arrange a cross party consultation to discuss the best way to support thr #mentalhealth of NHS workers & Nadine Dorries (Minister for Mental Health) playing to the gallery for cheap laughs. https://t.co/yI0N5wFGV2
I say that not because the Johnson government has a huge Parliamentary majority – granted to it by a population that was desperate to resolve the Brexit crisis that the Tories had created and gulled by rabidly right-wing mass media into thinking the Tories were the only party that could provide a solution (which is lunacy, if you think about it for just one moment).
The reason condemnation won’t work on Tories like Dorries can be summed up in a simple, well-known saying:
No sense, no feeling.
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