Jeremy Hunt: NHS problems completely unacceptable

Jeremy Hunt has said that performance in some parts of the NHS is “completely unacceptable”.

The health secretary said there was “no excuse” for some of the problems being seen in the health service and that some of the care being offered was not what anyone would want for their family.

His remarks, in an interview with the BBC, came after official figures for December and leaked January statistics for waiting times in England showed consecutive months of the worst delays in A&E since a four-hour target was introduced 13 years ago.

Earlier, one of his key advisers, Patrick Carter, had said that hospitals were under such extreme pressure that they were in a state of war.

On Thursday figures emerged showing that the number of A&E patients seen within the target of four hours fell to a record low of 86% in England in December, while those waiting longer than 12 hours to be admitted to a hospital bed doubled to more than 2,500 in 2016. The leaked January figures suggested a worse performance on A&E waiting times, with NHS England meeting its four hour target in 82% of cases.

The number of people waiting more than two months to start cancer treatment after an urgent referral was at a record high of 25,157 in 2016, and the proportion of patients receiving hospital treatment within 18 weeks fell below 90% for the first time since 2011.

Hunt said there was already a “big transformation programme” under way in the NHS with the aim of treating more people at home or in the community to ease burdens on hospitals.

But he said the changes would take time and said progress had been “disappointingly slow” in some areas.

“It is incredibly frustrating for me,” said the health secretary. “I am doing this job because I want NHS care to be the safest and best in the world. That kind of care is completely unacceptable. No one would want it for members of their own family.”

He said there were no excuses for cases such as that of 89-year-old Iris Sibley, who was stuck on a hospital ward at Bristol Royal Infirmary for more than six months because a nursing home place could not be found for her.

“It is terrible for Mrs Sibley but it is also very bad for the NHS,” Hunt said.
He insisted the government was addressing problems in the social care system which are preventing many elderly and frail patients from being discharged from hospital – so-called “bed-blocking”.

Hunt added: “The prime minister has been very clear: we recognise the pressure’s there. We recognise there is a problem about the sustainability of the social care system. That has to be addressed and we are going to do that.”

Barrister Sir Robert Francis, whose 2013 report uncovered poor care in Mid Staffordshire, said the NHS was facing an “existential crisis” which made a further similar scandal inevitable.

Francis, a non-executive director at the Care Quality Commission, told the Health Service Journal there was an “increasing disconnect” between what is said nationally about the NHS and “what people on the ground feel or see is going on”.

“Let’s make no bones about it, the NHS is facing an existential crisis,” he said. “The service is running faster and faster to try and keep up and is failing, manifestly failing.

“The danger is that we reach a tipping point; we haven’t reached it yet, but there will come a point where public confidence in the service dissipates.”

Jeremy Hunt: NHS problems completely unacceptable

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Poll: need to cigarettes be completely banned?

Tim Crocker-Buque, a expert registrar in public overall health medication who proposed the movement, mentioned that it is unusual for people to make an informed choice to smoke in the course of adulthood. Photograph: PhotoAlto / Alamy/Alamy

The British Healthcare Association will vote on Tuesday on whether to lobby the government to permanently ban cigarettes for any person born soon after the yr 2000. This would not stop any adults who currently smoke from carrying out so but would imply that it will turn out to be progressively illegal more than time.

Supporters of the movement at the doctors’ union say the measure is necessary due to the fact 80% of smokers who consider up the habit make the choice to do so as children. The BMA have previously successfully lobbied the government to ban smoking in public areas and in cars carrying young children. The smokers’ group Forest mentioned the thought was “preposterous and discriminatory”.

What do you believe?

Poll: need to cigarettes be completely banned?

Obama"s Appropriate: Marijuana Is Far Safer Than Alcohol, But Not Completely Secure

President Obama created a blunder in his January 27th New Yorker interview when he used individual anecdote to inform David Remnick, “I don’t feel [marijuana] is more unsafe than alcohol.”

Amount 1, he failed to cite information. Variety two, the press understandably failed to cite the 3 paragraphs subsequent to Remnick’s stick to-up query, “Is it less harmful than alcohol?”

(Go right here and then use your browser search for the first instance of “legalization of marijuana.”)

Yet again, whilst the president didn’t cite public wellness information, he produced an essential level:

“Less dangerous, he explained, ‘in terms of its affect on the individual client. It is not something I motivate, and I’ve advised my daughters I believe it’s a undesirable idea, a waste of time, not really healthy.’” [emphasis mine]

The president’s response reflects the difficulty in answering a press question in absolute terms on troubles that have gradations of conclusions primarily based on consideration of numerous, non-mutually-unique outcomes.

Comparison of dependence and harm among marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol. Not proven is caffeine, which is also referred to as a widespread social drug. Caffeine would be somewhere to the left of marijuana (much less bodily harm). (Photograph credit: Wikipedia)

Are we talking about direct effects of alcohol vs. marijuana? Are we talking about alcohol-associated illnesses vs. marijuana-associated disease? Are we speaking about automobile injuries and fatalities connected with driving underneath the influence of both drug? Are we speaking about quick-term or infrequent use relative to prolonged-term use? Are we speaking about how use of either drug prospects to incarceration, and how race is superimposed by law enforcement?

In fact, these kinds of considerations aren’t certain to recreational use of psychoactive chemical substances. They’re typical when society presses for absolute answers in which thoughtful threat evaluation is needed.

And when Lawyer Basic Eric Holder was asked this week by Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to respond to Obama’s comments, all he could muster was, “I consider that the use of any drug is possibly harmful. Integrated in that would be alcohol. I believe that any drug employed in an inappropriate way can be hazardous and alcohol is between these.”

I was a teenager in the late 1970s, the target audience for Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. As a mother or father, I subscribe to the “Just Say Know” philosophy, the title of a book co-authored by my Duke University pharmacologist colleague, Dr. Cindy Kuhn: Given science-primarily based factual data and advice on how parents, teachers, and so on. can talk with young individuals about the a variety of temptations they’ll encounter, kids who are going to make negative alternatives anyway may finish up creating choices that are less negative than other folks.

Does marijuana use lead to 88,000 U.S. deaths per 12 months?

There are no information to recommend that marijuana use is much more unsafe than alcohol use when thinking about the total U.S. population – straight, indirectly, brief-term, or prolonged-term.

Is marijuana secure? No, there is no such factor as absolutely security. And we’ll absolutely be studying a lot more as Colorado and Washington perform their experiments with lawful product sales of recreational marijuana. NIH’s Nationwide Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) cites a published survey examine that identified that, “6.eight percent of drivers, largely below age 35, who had been concerned in accidents tested constructive for THC alcohol levels over the legal restrict have been identified in 21 percent of such drivers.”

Alcohol is definitely addictive but marijuana is also identified to have addictive attributes and a withdrawal syndrome upon abrupt discontinuation of prolonged-term use. Yes, there are data to help Lady Gaga’s marijuana addiction declare this week.

Marijuana is also topic to some auxiliary risks of controlled substances whose solution good quality is uncontrolled. I’ve written in the previous elsewhere of marijuana end users struggling lead poisoning in Germany due to the fact dealers extra lead filings to their item to artificially improve the bodyweight. We’ve also covered how some imported marijuana may possibly include now-banned pesticides.

A single distinction is that we have far a lot more expertise with public overall health tracking of alcohol-connected offenses and illnesses. And that is what initially received me considering about this submit earlier this month, even just before the president’s feedback.

Extreme alcohol use was accountable for 88,000 U.S. deaths each and every 12 months among 2006 and 2010, costing the economic system $ 224 billion according to a January 10, 2014 report in the Centers for Condition Manage and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). That’s up from 75,766 alcohol-attributed deaths in 2001.

Obama"s Appropriate: Marijuana Is Far Safer Than Alcohol, But Not Completely Secure