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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."...

You’ve heard of Russian Roulette, the game where you put on round in a revolver, give the cylinder a quick spin, put the gun to your head and pull the trigger, made famous in The Deer Hunter? A strange little “game” — theoretically, the odds are 5 in 6 that the gammer will fall on an empty chamber — no harm. Well, apparently, the British NHS works on a similar, if less deliberate, basis.

As many as one in six patients treated in NHS hospitals and GPs’ surgeries is being misdiagnosed, experts have warned. Doctors were making mistakes in up to 15 per cent of cases because they were too quick to judge patients’ symptoms, they said, while others were reluctant to ask more senior colleagues for help. While in most cases the misdiagnosis did not result in the patient suffering serious harm, a sizeable number of the millions of NHS patients were likely to suffer significant health problems as a result, according to figures. It was said that the number of misdiagnoses was...

The court ruled that employees had the right to ask for statutory leave to be "reallocated" when it was spoilt by sickness. Under the terms of the judgement, employees would even be allowed to carry any annual leave ruined by illness over into the next holiday year. The ruling is effectively a new interpretation of the European Working Time Directive on workers' hours, which applies in Britain across the entire private and public sector. Leading employment lawyers warned it would be costly for businesses and that it left "the door open for abuse" by unscrupulous employees seeking to bolster their...

While the Government threatens to cut child benefit for the middle class in order to reduce the country’s banana republic-level of national debt, the Independent is calling for heroin to be made available on the NHS, along with boob jobs, Viagra, non-medical abortions and all the other things William Beveridge had exactly in mind when he set it up. This “clamour” for free heroin, at the cost of £15,000-per-(smack)-head, came about after a group led by the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse successfully reduced the amount that addicts stole over a certain period. (snip) But for whose benefit is...

A report [by the Patients Association, an independent charity] presented a catalogue of end-of-life cases that demonstrated, in its words, "a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care." It provided details of what it described as "appalling treatment," which could be found across the NHS. A few days later, a group of senior doctors and health-care experts ... expressed concern about ... a program ... involving withdrawal of fluids and nourishment for patients thought to be dying. Noting that in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths in the U.K. came after "terminal sedation," their letter concluded with the chilling observation that experienced...

A retired teacher died of a burst stomach ulcer after a paramedic told her to ‘stop being such a drama queen’ and failed to take her to hospital, an inquest heard yesterday. Mother-of-three Eileen Ellis-Whitfield, 63, died just hours after an ambulance was called to her home when she fell seriously ill with chronic stomach pains.

September 14, 2009 Families 'Kept In The Dark' As Doctors Make Life-or-Death Decisions (David Moore/Getty Images) End-of-life care is the cause of many complaints One in four families are not informed when doctors decide that a patient in hospital is dying under a widely used NHS scheme for palliative care, a national audit has found. Less than half of terminally ill patients and their relatives are offered religious or spiritual support in their final days and hours, while a quarter of doctors are not being trained within hospitals to deal with dying patients. The audit, seen by The Times, comes...

While the Obama administration has been denying that so-called death panels are planned as part of the public option, it is undeniable that these panels exist in the UK and have resulted in premature deaths for non-terminal patients: “Forecasting death is an inexact science,” they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong. As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.” Horrific individual cases came to light in recent weeks, including...

Knowing that I had spent the summer in England, a fellow law professor recently asked me whether "the Republicans" had hired me to advertise against the president's health-care plan. My response was, "No, but they could have." I would have done it for free.Watching the health-care debate from the other side of the Atlantic this summer was very interesting. First of all, British doctors do not like having their system held up as an example of what not to do. There were several panel discussions on television and the radio in which doctors defended the British medical plan; the...

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday. Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy - almost four months early. They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment. Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support. She said he was breathing unaided, had...

An NHS whistleblower claims that he was subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment after raising concerns about patient safety and care at a London hospital. Ramon Niekrash, a consultant urologist, says he repeatedly raised concerns about problems at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in South London which he said were caused by cost-cutting. These included a shortage of senior doctors, too many patients and the risk of hospital acquired infection, such as MRSA. But at one point a senior doctor at the hospital allegedly said that she wished that Australian-trained Ramon Niekrash, was “in chains on a plane in Heathrow...

Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under a scheme by Britain’s equivalent of medicare to help end their lives, leading doctors claim. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under National Health Service guidelines introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patients and many are put on continuous sedation until they die. But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, the experts say. As a result, the scheme is...

A young mother's premature baby died in her arms after doctors refused to help because it was born just before 22-week cut-off point for treatment.

A young mother's premature baby died in her arms after doctors refused to help because it was born just before 22-week cut-off point for treatment. Sarah Capewell, 23, gave birth to her son Jayden when she was 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy. Although doctors refused to place the baby in intensive care, Jayden lived for two hours before he passed away at James Paget Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk, last October.

The Conservative party says hospitals are at breaking point and claims that a second wave of swine flu could result in a bed shortage The NHS may not have enough intensive care beds to cope if a second wave of swine flu hits the country, the Conservative party claimed today. Hospitals are already at "breaking point" and are having to close critical care beds to new admissions for large parts of the year, according to the shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley. The allegation comes amid intensifying party exchanges over the future of the NHS. The Tories are attempting the novel...

Campaigners have called for an investigations into an NHS scheme which helps to end the lives of terminally patients after a group of leading doctors warned that some were dying prematurely. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph the medical experts warned that Britain was facing a “national crisis in care” because some patients were having fluids and drugs removed after being wrongly judged to be close to death. Many were also being sedated, making it more difficult for doctors to tell their true condition. The experts warned that the scheme was encouraging a "tick box" culture in which healthcare...

A mother who watched her premature baby die when doctors refused to help him has condemned medical guidelines which said he should not be saved. Sarah Capewell gave birth to a baby son when she was 21 weeks and 5 days into her pregnancy. Her pleas to doctors and midwives to admit the newborn to a special care baby unit were rejected. Staff at James Paget Hospital, in Gorleston, Norfolk, told her that if her son Jayden had been born two days later, at 22 weeks, they would have tried to help him. Instead, Miss Capewell, who had previously suffered...

A catalogue of systemic failings and blunders allowed a schizophrenic killer, Peter Bryan, to murder two more people, including eating parts of the brain of one, two inquiries have found. Bryan, 39, killed Brian Cherry in 2004 after being allowed out of a psychiatric ward before cooking and eating part of his flesh and brain. Following that killing he was sent to Broadmoor secure hospital but within 10 days of his arrival there he attacked fellow patient Richard Loudwell, who later died from his injuries. Two separate inquiries in to the killings both found failings in his care and supervision....

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn. As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed...

to death on the NHS Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs...

Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving,...

Remember when Michael Moore depicted the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) as a superior health care system in his 2007 documentary "Sicko"? That romanticizing on the silver screen might have seemed like a good idea for the American society, but according to Lord Ara Darzi, it's not ideal for the United States. Darzi, a former British Health Minister, appeared on CNBC's Aug. 31 "Street Signs" to defend the NHS from attacks made in a TV spot, which had been rejected by ABC and NBC for airing because they were "too partisan." ...more (w/video)...

"Dreadful, neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel.” Those are the words used by Claire Rayner, herself a former nurse, to describe the way many nurses today treat elderly patients. Introducing a report by the Patients Association last week, she described shocking standards of nursing care in hospitals up and down the country. The stories are horrifying — old people neglected, lying in their own faeces and urine, hungry, thirsty and afraid, while nurses chat callously at the nursing station, indifferent to the suffering around them. Since the report was published the Patients Association has been flooded with hundreds of...

Patients in Health Service hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail, scientists warned yesterday. They say frail and elderly patients do not get the help they need with meals, and nobody checks whether they get enough to eat. Despite years of Government promises to tackle poor hospital nutrition, food still arrives cold, and patients often miss out because meal times clash with tests and operations. The Daily Mail has been highlighting the scandal of old people not being fed properly in hospital as part of its Dignity for the Elderly campaign The latest figures show...

The standard of care in some hospital wards and nursing homes “would shame a third world country”, nurses have warned Their comments follow a damning report which estimated that one million patients had suffered appalling care, including neglect and cruelty, at the hands of NHS staff, many of them nurses. Hundreds more people have come forward with their tales of appalling treatment since the report, by the Patients Association, was published on Thursday. Nursing leaders have defended the profession, insisting that while poor care can never be excused only a small minority of staff were involved and that part of...