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A grandmother died after 'gross failures' by NHS doctors who injected her lungs with a chemical that was ten times the recommended strength, a coroner ruled today. Rosemary McFarlane, 64, spent ten days in 'burning agony' after receiving the lethal dose during what should have been a routine procedure. The caustic chemical, phosphate buffered saline, burned the inside of her lungs. The hospital's usual supplier had run out of the PBS fluid and a pharmacy was asked to provide the solution. It was bought over the internet by a junior pharmacist, who mistook '10x' on the label to mean ten...

A controversial NHS pilot is providing the contraceptive pill to teenage girls without prescription in pharmacies. Southwark and Lambeth, two inner-city areas in London with the highest teenage pregnancy rates, are the first to try the approach. Experts have warned the government is struggling to meet its target of halving teenage pregnancies by 2010. But opponents said there was no evidence providing the pill over the counter would make a difference.

Tens of thousands of osteoporosis sufferers will be denied drugs unless their condition worsens, the NHS medicines rationing body has ruled after a year long legal battle. Campaigners branded the decision 'unethical' and called for the guidance to be reviewed next year. Patients with the disease, which causes the bones to thin and become brittle and prone to fracture, will have fewer treatment options if they do not respond to the first drug, it was argued. The original guidance was issued in October last year and since then the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence has been embroiled in...

Perhaps the most publicized, least understood aspect of the over 2,000 page, $850 billion health care reform bill being debated now in the U.S. Senate is the "public option." Former Governor Howard Dean asserted last week at Yale University that without the public option, "this bill is worthless and should be defeated." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing for a Senate vote by Christmas. In arguing the merits and failings of a nationalized, government-sponsored health coverage program, there is an example of such a system Americans may wish to examine.

The dispute followed a report in which at least 12 trusts in England were criticised for significantly underperforming on standards such as patient safety and infection control. Dr Foster, a private company that works with the NHS, also highlighted a further 27 hospital trusts that were found to have unusually high mortality rates, resulting in an estimated 5,000 avoidable deaths last year. Dr Foster said it had uncovered widespread safety issues including 39 per cent of trusts “failing to investigate unexpected deaths or cases of serious harm on their wards”. Items such as swabs and drillbits were left in patients...

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer every year because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government's director of cancer services. The figure is twice the previous estimate for preventable deaths. Earlier detection of symptoms could save between 5,000 and 10,000 lives in England a year, Prof Mike Richards will reveal this week. The higher figure is nearly twice his previous calculation, which put the figure at about 5,000. Richards has revised up his estimate after studying the three deadliest forms of the disease ‑ lung, bowel and breast cancer ‑ which together kill...

No matter how you slice it, this is just frightening. I stumbled upon this diagram (from Great Britain’s National Health Service) on the BBC news site. Check the site out, please. Am I missing something? I read and re-read the article and could find no reference to the numbers – only those on the picture. And they certainly don’t jive with the numbered list below Mr. Skinned. Point #1 clearly aligns with the #1 symptoms listed below the figure: whole body | high temperature, tiredness and lowered immunity. Point #2, ditto. #3 location is the stomach: this is where you...

One of Labour's great triumphs with the National Health Service is that people now go into hospital to die rather than to be cured. It seems to render the whole debate about assisted suicide utterly pointless. Who needs a Dignitas clinic when you can check into a hospital in Basildon and be relatively certain to be taken out in a box? It is a further achievement of our monitoring, regulating culture that even the monitors and the regulators don't seem to have a clue how bad things are – or they certainly didn't in Basildon. This exposes one of the...

The amount spent on employing managers has risen by a quarter, or £78 million, in the past two years, the study shows. NHS Trusts blamed Whitehall targets for the increase. It comes a day after NICE, the drugs rationing watchdog, refused funding for life-prolonging bowel cancer drug Avastin, saying it was not cost effective. Pulse, a magazine for GPs, found that projected spending on management salaries has increased by 25 per cent between 2007/08 and 2009/10 in primary care trusts, which look after community services. It was up from £312million to £390million. But the true figure is likely to be...

70 deaths on ward of shame: Patients neglected by lazy nurses in a filthy, blood-spattered casualty unit, says damning report By Daniel Martin Last updated at 9:39 AM on 27th November 2009 Dozens of patients died needlessly as a result of filthy conditions in an NHS hospital, a shocking report said last night. Appalling nursing care in Basildon University Hospital contributed to a mortality rate that was more than a third higher than the national average. At least 70 people may have died who should have been saved. It is the latest example of patients paying the ultimate price for...

Hundreds of patients may have died needlessly at an NHS hospital due to appalling standards of care, a damning report has found. Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership ... Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours. Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns. But...

Gordon Brown is facing a damaging rift with his party after slowing the pace of reform in the NHS, The Times has learnt. Private companies and charities are being frozen out of the NHS, prompting accusations that the Government has bowed to pressure from the unions. Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, is facing a Cabinet backlash, criticism from the former ministers John Hutton and Alan Milburn and attacks from the CBI and charity groups over proposals to limit outside involvement in the NHS. The Department of Health will publish new guidelines shortly that limit private companies and charities to providing...

The Liverpool Care Pathway, a NHS programme for terminally ill patients close to death, has been at the centre of a storm of controversy. Now patients are demanding answers. Jean Cutler knows precisely how she would like to die. Alert and free of pain in the familiarity of her light-filled, home, she would glance one last time at her lovingly-tended garden, with its whispering trees and the stream winding into the bluebells, and kiss her husband Richard goodbye. But she knows, too, that this happy dream of death can never be. She is in the late stages of mesothelioma –...

The boy, known as Georgie Smith, has wanted to be a girl since he was a toddler. He said: "I'm old enough to know what I want. What I want is to be a girl." His mother Carole, 41, has criticised the NHS for preventing treatment until Georgie reaches puberty – meaning that his hormones will give him a manly appearance. She wants him to be given hormone blockers now. She told The Sun: "With his puberty suspended, he wouldn't grow to six foot or have big hands." The mother-of-three said that her son wanted to be a girl from...

Health trusts must do more to help doctors and nurses exercise and give up smoking and heavy drinking, says the Government. NHS organisations will be expected to improve access to intervention programmes such as counselling or gyms as part of a drive to reduce sickness absence, which costs £1.5 billion a year. The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health were having a direct impact on the quality of patient care. The Health Secretary is expected to accept all the recommendations of the final review, drawn up by...

Couples are to be offered marriage guidance counselling for free on the NHS, in a move which has drawn strong condemnation from patients and doctors' groups. Couples with relationship problems will be offered free sessions for up to six months, as part of a £270 million programme to increase the provision of "talking therapies" for the public, Andy Burnham, the health secretary, will announce this week. Doctors and patients' groups said they were "horrified" by the use of NHS resources for relationship advice when patients with cancer and dementia were being denied treatment they desperately needed. Mr Burnham will say...

The Arts Council has given a epileptic dancer £14,000 to stop taking her medication and have a seizure on stage. Rita Marcalo’s 24-hour performance, involving strobe lights and sleep deprivation, is billed as a study of the “conceptual and physical interfaces between dance, movement and epilepsy”. Epilepsy charities said that the event turned a much misunderstood condition into a freak show and warned of the potentially severe dangers of coming off epilepsy drugs. Marcalo said that she wanted to raise awareness of epilepsy as “an invisible disability” and would use next month’s adults-only show at Bradford Playhouse to explore “my...

The statistics showing when accident and emergency departments discharge or admit patients should worry everyone. What they clearly illustrate is the extent to which healthcare professional’s clinical decision making is tied into the 4 hour A&E target looming over them. This can lead to the complete and utter distortion of clinical care decisions. Often, diagnosis and decision making in medicine is a waiting game. You order tests, you record vital signs. For some patients the decision to be kept in or sent home might be the same regardless of when you were seen. But the huge spike in decision making...

Doctors and nurses should be more honest and open when things go wrong and offer an apology to the patient or their family under new guidance to the NHS. Clinicians are often fearful of saying sorry when a patient has been harmed by a blunder because it may influence any future legal action, but it is the 'right thing to do, the head of the National Patient Safety Agency has said. When patients file complaints or litigation, their aim is often for the people involved to say sorry and to ensure the same thing does not happen to someone else,...

If we are to escape from dilemmas such as Nice's fateful decision on Nexavar, it can only be by permitting additional revenue streams into the NHS, argues Janet Daley. Nice has made another of its fateful (or "fatal") decisions: the drug, Nexavor, which significantly prolongs the life of liver cancer patients, and is widely available in other countries, is not be used by the NHS because it is too expensive. So all those who might have benefited from it have effectively been told that, on accounting principles, they are not worth keeping alive. Nice is functioning as what the US...

Dr Otto Chan told a hearing in East London that some doctors at the Royal London Hospital were ''exposed'' to procedures that they were not trained for. He said: ''The department was going rapidly backwards, I had real serious concerns about patient care in relation to the training programme. ''The junior staff in our department were doing too much unsupervised work.'' Dr Chan added: ''The juniors were being exposed to procedures that they were clearly not trained to do.'' The radiologist said junior doctors were sometimes given notes on how to do a procedure and ''being told to go and...

Older people find the NHS confusing, neglectful and even “ageist”, according to Dame Joan Bakewell, the Government’s adviser on the elderly. Many believe that their illnesses are taken for granted and treated less seriously than those among the young, she warned. In a report on her first year as the official “Voice of Older People”, Dame Joan, 76, said that she had been taken aback by the “urgency and desperation” of the letters she had received highlighting areas of concern in the service. On occasions she had been “stopped in the street and beseeched” to investigate dirty hospital wards. She...

Russian crime gangs are making millions by selling counterfeit Tamiflu online to Britons woried about swine flu, an internet security firm has claimed. Anxious residents who fear they may not be able to obtain the drug through the NHS could be funding organised crime abroad as well as putting themselves at risk of identity fraud when they buy the potentially useless drugs.

Even greater numbers of relatives and friends said they wanted to complain but had not, a new report by the Alzheimer’s Society shows. The figures are released just days after an independent review warned that 1,800 dementia patients are being killed every year by controversial ‘chemical cosh’ drugs given to keep them quiet. Carers told the charity of sufferers left to sit in their own urine and nurses who complained that they had too many patients to look after. The report also heard of patients going hungry because they were not helped to eat or drink and many were generally...

Anyone who wishes to become a nurse will need to have a degree within four years, in one of the biggest shake-ups of medical education in the history of the NHS. The Government will announce today that all new nurses will need to be educated to degree level in an attempt to improve the quality of patient care. The move, which will be enforced from 2013, is designed to raise the status of nursing and to end the stigma of the “doctor’s handmaiden”. Critics claim that the changes, to be outlined by Ann Keen, the Health Minister, will create an...

Patients who do not get the treatment that they need from the NHS within 18 weeks are to be given the legal right to free private care. The Cabinet agreed this week that the legislation, placing maximum waiting times on the statute book for the first time, should be rushed through Parliament before the next election. Cancer patients, in particular, will receive funding for private treatment if they have not seen an NHS specialist within two weeks of GP referral. Downing Street says that the two legal rights, which will be unveiled in next month’s Queen’s Speech, are designed to...

David Cameron promised yesterday to cut the cost of running the NHS by a third while handing day-to-day management of the health service over to an independent body. The Tory leader guaranteed that up to £1.5 billion of savings on bureaucracy would be reinvested elsewhere in the health service. He also pledged to extend “patient power” and to create a rebranded Department of Public Health if his party won the next election. Experts said that the plans to make the NHS more independent under a new executive board lacked detail, risked the health service becoming an unaccountable quango and could...

They warn that thousands of pensioners paying their fees in full – because their assets are worth more than £23,000 – are being charged over the odds in order to cover for the far lower rates paid for state-funded places. The care home owners have instructed Cherie Booth, QC, the wife of former prime minister Tony Blair, to mount a legal challenge to force England's local authorities to increase the rates they pay. In some parts of the country, care homes are charging "self-funders" more than £200 a week on top of the rates paid by local authorities, research shows....

Doctors want to take the one-year-old, born with a rare neuromuscular condition, off the ventilator which allows him to breathe. Their application is supported by the child's mother, who is separated from his father. On Monday, the hospital will take its application to take the boy off life support to the High Court, where lawyers for the father will fight the case. The one-year-old, known only as Baby RB, was born with congenital myasthenic syndrome, a muscle weakness which severely limits the movement of his limbs and the ability to breathe independently. Lawyers for the father say the baby's brain...

THE government has been forced to rewrite its advice on breast cancer screening after research showed that thousands of women have been misled into having unnecessary surgery. Women invited for screening by the National Health Service will be told that some of the cancers detected will be dormant and may never spread to other tissue. Research published this year showed that for every 2,000 women screened regularly for a decade, one life would be saved but 10 healthy women would be treated unnecessarily. The information now given to women has been criticised for advertising only the benefits and not the...

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, declared that a "key battleground" for the next election will be a Labour pledge to offer patients the legal right to free private care if they do not get the treatment they need from the NHS within 18 weeks. Cancer patients will receive funding for private treatment if they have not seen a specialist within two weeks of a GP referral. The maximum waiting times will be placed on the statute book for the first time and the measure rushed through Parliament before the next election. The move...

Poppy was transferred to the leading children's hospital in London for specialist care after she was born three months early on Christmas Eve last year, in Basildon, Essex. But she died after a "domino effect" of mistakes, an inquest was told. Rebecca Tite, a trainee nurse, who had spent just three weeks in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, set up a machine supplying her with glucose incorrectly, flooding her body with the solution. The levels of glucose in Poppy's blood rose to 20 times the maximum level they should have been, causing ''devastating effects'' to her body, St Pancras...

Anti-psychotic drugs, which are recommended in the short-term to calm down people who are agitated or violent, are known to be overprescribed, particularly in care homes. A survey of 62 primary care trusts (PCTs) for GP newspaper found 57 per cnt were failing to offer alternatives to the drugs risperidone and olanzapine. GPs have said they are forced to prescribe the drugs owing to a lack of replacement services for patients. In January, a three-year study published in The Lancet Neurology found people taking the drugs for long periods were twice as likely to die early as those not on...

Patients with terminal illness are being heavily sedated by doctors before their deaths in a form of “slow euthanasia”, research suggests. A poll of nearly 3,000 doctors found that almost one in five had administered infusions of drugs to keep patients unconscious for hours or days at a time. In appropriate doses, sedatives and strong painkillers are considered a valuable way of easing the pain and anxiety of patients who are dying with conditions such as cancer. But 18.7 per cent of British doctors polled said they used drugs to invoke “continuous deep sedation” in a dying patient, a practice...

A longstanding ban that prevents gay and bisexual men from giving blood is being reviewed and could be overturned as early as next year, the Government has said. Men who have had sex with other men are currently banned for life from donating blood, under measures designed to reduce the risk of passing on infections such as HIV. But gay rights campaigners have condemned the policy as being irrational. The Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (Sabto) meets today to discuss evidence for and against exclusion of high-risk donors as part of an official review of...

As few as 4.7 per cent of women in England have been given the option of having their child at hospital, in a birth centre or at home, according to the National Childbirth Trust. In April 2007 ministers guaranteed all pregnant women would be able to select the place of birth where they would feel most comfortable. The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, all say that they aim to do the same but have not made any time-specific promises. Research shows that women who give birth away from hospital obstetric units are more likely to have a natural...

Since the option to go private with NHS funding was introduced in April last year, almost 10,000 patients have sought diagnoses and waiting list operations in private hospitals - the majority of them in the past year. While it is up to individual hospitals whether to take patients at NHS prices, almost all have now opted to do so given the drop in people willing to pay themselves for private healthcare in the recession, and in private healthcare insurance takeup. According to Bob Ricketts, director of system management at the Department of Health, 2,100 hospitals were registering a month in...

A boy of 10 died from meningitis after doctors wrongly diagnosed a migraine and told his mother to give him calpol, an inquest was told yesterday. William Cressey saw five doctors in three days before finally suffering 'catastrophic' brain damage. His mother, Cheryl, 48, repeatedly told doctors that she suspected meningitis but each time was ignored, she said. Just hours before he died the schoolboy begged one of those doctors: 'Please help me. I'm going to die.' By then his face was so swollen that he could barely see and he was drifting in and out of consciousness. Wiping tears...

Stunning! Britain's National Health Service care standards may be good enough for ordinary folks, but the people who work there know better. They are getting taxpayer money to pay for their own private care. The UK Times reports: (snip) In order to serve the people better, the "public servants" must be treated better than the ordinary people. This exact logic was used in the old Soviet Union to justify very different treatment for the elite, who naturally could not bear the poverty they forced on the rest of the populace. It is time that Americans learn and use the concept...

THE National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists. More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long. Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling — all widely available on the NHS....

A doctor who failed to spot the symptoms of cervical cancer in a young woman eight times in four years faces being struck off. Dr Navin Shankar told Nikki Sams her health problems were 'nothing serious', never performed an internal examination and ignored her pleas for a hospital check-up. The blunders only emerged when she was transferred to another surgery after Dr Shankar was suspended in a separate case of serious misconduct. Her new doctor immediately ordered a smear test which showed the advertising saleswoman had abnormal cells and more tests found she had a tumour. Miss Sams had a...

The Care Quality Commission said that “alarm bells” should ring in the boardrooms of 47 of the country’s 392 NHS trusts, which have been persistently rated as either weak or fair. “They must do better for their patients… It is clear that many have significant work to do and a short time in which to do it,” said Cynthia Bower, the commission’s chief executive. From next April all NHS organisations must be registered with the CQC in order to treat patients.

At around 4am on Monday, a friend of mine was woken by a call from the private care home in south-west London where her 98-year-old grandmother is resident. "Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?" "What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?" "She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?" Befuddled by sleep, she didn't immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which...

An Iraq war veteran died after receiving cancerous lungs from a heavy smoker in a transplant. Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen’s Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable respiratory condition. But the organs were from a donor who was believed to have smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day. A tumour was found after the transplant, and its growth was accelerated by the drugs that Mr Millington took to prevent his body rejecting the organs. Because he was a cancer patient, he was not allowed to receive a further pair of lungs,...

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A leading UK hospital has defended its practice of using organs donated by smokers after the death of a soldier who received the cancerous lungs of a heavy smoker. Corporal Matthew Millington, 31, died at his home in 2008, less than a year after receiving a transplant that was supposed to save his life at Papworth Hospital -- the UK's largest specialist cardiothoracic hospital, in Cambridgeshire, east England. Papworth Hospital released a statement saying using donor lungs from smokers was not "unusual." The statement added that the hospital had no option but to use lungs from...

A grandfather who beat cancer was wrongly told the disease had returned and left to die at a hospice which pioneered a controversial 'death pathway'. Doctors said there was nothing more they could do for 76-year-old Jack Jones, and his family claim he was denied food, water and medication except painkillers. He died within two weeks. But tests after his death found that his cancer had not come back, and he was in fact suffering from pneumonia brought on by a chest infection. To his family's horror, they were told he could have recovered if he'd been given the correct...

A 72-year-old grandmother had her leg amputated after being told she had cancer only to find out her leg was healthy all along. Doreen Nicholls underwent the surgery in 2007 and now needs a wheelchair to get about. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the grandmother was wrongly diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer and was told that without a leg amputation, she would die. Tests carried out after the operation revealed that her left leg, which had been cut off below the knee, was in fact healthy.

The whole title is: Your daughter is not disabled enough: Mother's fury as 10-year-old with prosthetic leg suffers benefits penalty for trying to be normal. For ten-year-old Devon Taverner, overcoming adversity is a way of life as she fights to be just another normal little girl. But all her bravery in dealing with being born with a severely disabled leg could not prepare her for the cruellest of blows delivered by benefits bureaucrats. After receiving a school report praising her for how well she was coping with her prosthetic leg, Devon and her mother were shattered to learn the Government...

A plumber whose arm was left twisted grotesquely out of shape in an accident ten months ago has had an operation to correct it 'cancelled four times'. Torron Eeles, 50, has been left unable to work since falling down the stairs and now fears he may lose his home after being denied incapacity benefit. The father-of-three today hit out at the NHS for the 'unacceptable delays', but East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust said Mr Eeles had his operation cancelled on 'only' two occasions on clinical safety grounds. His left arm has hung limply by his side since he fractured...

Britain's vaunted nationalized healthcare system is bankrupting the nation and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is warning that if the UK doesn't start charging for healthcare and raise the retirement age above 65 the country will not be able to get out from under the widening fiscal disaster. The IMF is telling the British government that she must instigate a wholesale revamping of its pensioner and healthcare system to "help keep a lid on the debt." Treasury officials admitted recently that the deficit is expected to rise "£200billion this year - £25billion more than the Chancellor predicted in the Budget."...