The Liberal Democrats have pledged to increase income tax by a penny for every earner to fund a £6bn-a-year cash injection for the NHS and social care.
In what was described as their “flagship” spending commitment of the general election campaign, the party’s leader, Tim Farron, said voters recognised the need to “chip in a little more” to address the “chronic underfunding” of healthcare.
Under the Lib Dem plan, 1p would be added to the basic, higher and additional rates of income tax and the rate of dividend tax from the next financial year, with the £6bn raised being ring-fenced for the NHS, social care and public health.
The proposal – which echoes the Lib Dems’ pledge from the 1990s to put a penny on income tax for education – will be seen as a clear attempt to capitalise on public concerns about the state of healthcare.
Theresa May has insisted the Conservatives have no plans for tax rises while appearing to back away from a previous pledge not to put up income tax or national insurance.
Farron said: “Theresa May doesn’t care about the NHS or social care. People are lying on trolleys in hospital corridors and she has done nothing.
“The Liberal Democrats will rescue the NHS and social care. We are prepared to be honest with people and say that we will all need to chip in a little more.”
The party’s health spokesman, Norman Lamb, said: “The NHS was once the envy of the world and this pledge is the first step in restoring it to where it should be. A penny on the pound to save the NHS is money well spent in our view.”
The Lib Dems pointed to an opinion poll finding from last year, which suggested 70% of voters would back a 1p rise in income tax if the money was guaranteed to go to the NHS.
According to figures released by the party, the rise would mean an increase of £33 a year – or less than £1 a week – for someone earning £15,000 a year, rising to £133 a year – or less than £3 a week – for someone earning £25,000.
At the top end, someone earning £150,000 would pay an extra £1,500 a year – or £29 a week – while someone on £250,000 would pay £2,500 a year, or £48 a week extra.
In the longer term, the Lib Dems said they would introduce a health and care tax to bring spending on both services together in a collective budget, and make clear on people’s payslips what was being spent on those services.
The party said it would seek to establish a cross-party health and care convention to review longer term sustainability of the health and care finances while setting up an office of health and care funding, similar to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
From every previous NHS crisis, the tipping point should have come last week. Prime ministers crumple when people die – as they have in the Royal Worcester’s corridors. When opinion polls send concern about the NHS soaring above everything else at 61%, above immigration at 41% and Brexit at 36%, sirens should wail inside No 10. But no, not yet.
When the Royal College of Surgeons protests at cancer operations cancelled, is that a tipping point? When nearly half of all hospitals declare major alerts for lack of beds, that’s an emergency. There’s no winter flu, no Arctic weather, just pressure from underfunding, like an aneurysm about to burst. But the prime minister is not for turning, not yet.
King’s College hospital is typical – as its clinical director of emergency medicine, Malcolm Tunnicliff, explains. He stands in the middle of a 10-cubicle emergency section where this week he had 17 trollies crammed in, jammed around the nursing station with barely enough room to squeeze past.
Other hospitals call a “divert” – to send away ambulances from their doors. “We never do that, on principle, because every hospital’s in the same boat. We are here for everyone, all the time,” says Tunnicliff. Like so many NHS staff you meet, his natural blend of enthusiasm and determination to cope leaves him perplexed by what’s happening. “The last four weeks are the worst I’ve experienced. We all worry all the time.”
Recently he’s had 6% more patients – with 10% more needing resuscitation – and he can’t fill all his vacancies, leaving him scouring the world for staff because of the government’s failure to train enough people: 19% fewer nurses are in training. “Day after day my staff here go the extra mile, like Duracell bunnies,” he says. But he fears many may leave as a result of the pressure.
The last straw may be the flame-thrower of blame from Westminster, attacking staff and patients and GP opening hours. No, Tunnicliff says, only 4% come here with things GPs should see. The blockage is a lack of beds for skyrocketing numbers of sicker and older patients. Nationally, 13,822 beds have been cut since 2010, losing 5m bed days. The 40% cuts in social care multiply the blocked bed crisis. NHS funding has never had a six-year squeeze like this, falling far behind similar countries in beds, staff and cash per head. Yesterday the axing of 538 staff from the Department of Health looked like panic, while public health is cut by cash-starved councils – storing up worse problems for the future.
Hospitals usually afraid to blow whistles now talk to anyone who’ll listen. I’ve never known normally cautious managers and senior staff show such unguarded urgency to reveal all. But one exception is the Royal Berkshire, where Theresa May’s Maidenhead constituents go in an emergency. They maintain omerta, allow no visit, put up no spokesperson, apparently paralysed with fright: the care quality commission brands it “needs improvement”, not “safe” or “responsive” nor “well-led”. Does May ever visit?
She should listen to Kings College hospital’s chair, Bob Kerslake – another NHS leader who has become extraordinarily outspoken. Here is a man of exceptional experience and wisdom, a former chief executive of Sheffield city council, elevated to permanent secretary of the communities and local government department and on up to head of the home civil service. He’s a maths graduate and chartered account, an exceptionally numerate civil servant. The government’s numbers are “kidology”, he says. As the Kings Fund showed, the NHS got £4.5bn, not £10bn, extra to 2020: and this was its frontloaded year, with far less to come after April, and zero – yes, zero increase – for 2018, the NHS’s 70th anniversary year.
Jeremy Hunt: up to 30% of people using A&E departments do not need emergency care
Here’s more kidology, Kerslake says. “Some 98% of trusts signed up to control totals that most know are impossible.” His own trust was told to make a surplus but has a £2m deficit, so they will be punished by losing their sustainability and transformation money, which will leave them with a £30m deficit instead. I asked him to repeat it twice, it was so incredible. Yet next year they are told to make a surplus, yes, a surplus of £26m – fantasy accounting that no one believes is remotely achievable. “And we have used every wheeze, holding off paying bills … using our capital budget so we have nothing for essentials, like replacing worn-out dialysis machines.”
But when he talks to the Treasury, “They give me the line. I don’t know if they believe it.” The line says what May says: “It’s only a winter blip, we gave the NHS more than they asked for, and GP opening hours are to blame.” Chancellor Philip Hammond is immovable: he says that to give more to the NHS’s “bottomless pit” would create a moral hazard. Kerslake says NHS England’s Simon Stevens forthrightness at the Commons public accounts committee last week has “opened the floodgates, letting others speaking out”.
Is May listening? Talk to the hand. No 10 hopes compassion fatigue will stop the flow of drearily identical stories from A&Es as the news moves on. Brexit has the merit of driving the NHS off front pages. Politically, why worry when there’s no opposition? Polls show that even the NHS is regarded as safer in the hands of May than Jeremy Corbyn. She has plenty of her own ignorant and partisan commentariat opining that “money isn’t the problem, it needs reform” – calling for top-ups and private insurance.
But May can’t defy the NHS laws of gravity that force every prime minister to U-turn on underfunding. Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair all buckled. This crisis looks set to outdo all those, says Chris Ham, NHS historian and head of the King’s Fund. History shows – and this was proved in the Blair years – that when the NHS reaches roughly EU funding levels, its results soar. When funding falls too far, trolleys pile up in corridors.
What’s the tipping point? Disasters forced on to the Mail’s front page, the only media she cares about (yesterday it ran instead with a Nigerian health tourist mother giving birth to twins at taxpayers’ expense). What else would it take? Nightly news from the A&E war zone, more care homes going bust – and deaths. Until her final hubristic year, Thatcher knew when to swerve – but May’s obstinacy might do for her.
One thing would force her hand – a joint resignation by Simon Stevens and Jim Mackey of NHS Improvement, announcing they can no longer be held legally responsible for the safety of patients. They just might, as a final act of service to rescue the NHS.
It speaks volumes about government priorities that the Treasury briefed journalists ahead of Wednesday’s autumn statement that an extra £1.3bn would be spent on roads. Yet we have been kept in the dark over any rescue package for the tottering social care system, on which the chances of the NHS getting through the winter so critically depend.
As it happens, £1.3bn is also the price of a basic rescue for social care. It is the calculation by the Local Government Association (LGA) of the gap between what care providers in England say they need now to sustain threadbare state-funded services for older and disabled people and what councils say they can afford. To meet rising demand, inflation and the costs of the “national living wage” next year would require the same sum again.
Pretty much everyone outside the government understands the perilous position of the social care system, highlighted again this week by withdrawal from the market of another leading homecare provider, Mitie, and by a survey of councils suggesting that four in five local authorities do not have enough provision in their areas – especially for care at home, “extra care” housing with support and specialist nursing homes for dementia.
Relations between social care and the NHS have frequently been awkward and testy. Yet health leaders have been queueing up to say that if there is any spare cash going, give it to the poor folks next door (provided they spend it on keeping people away from hospitals already bursting at the seams two months before winter pressures traditionally bite). Even the health and social care regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has bravely stood up and warned of a system almost at tipping point.
Expectations are modest. While sector leaders say there must be a far bigger long-term settlement, for now they are looking realistically for renewal of the power English councils were given this year to add up to 2% to council tax bills for adult social care, ideally increasing that amount. They also want the extra funding, under the so-called Better Care Fund, already earmarked for the end of the decade brought forward to next year.
That there has been no word on this from the Treasury, even obliquely from the usual sources, is worrying. In a reply last week to Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Commons health select committee – who had warned that NHS reforms would be undeliverable without urgent action to improve social care – the chancellor, Philip Hammond, said he recognised that conditions were challenging and would “continue to closely monitor the position”.
Most observers still think he will find something for social care. But their faith in that extends little beyond rationalising that “he must, mustn’t he?”. Treasury officials are notoriously deaf to special pleading and, let us be frank, social care has done rather a lot of that over the years, not always very well.
One problem is the sector’s apparent inability to make a unified case. Even now, various figures are put on the scale of the funding gap it faces, from the LGA’s £1.3bn (or is it £2.6bn?) to £1.6bn advanced by social services directors and £1.9bn put forward by three leading health thinktanks.
While the size of a water bottle may be immaterial to a man dying of thirst, The Treasury expects precision and rigour in the cases it considers. Another problem is that the evidence of crisis isn’t entirely consistent. Even as care-home chains are privately warning ministers that up to a quarter of beds are at risk of closure, a leading property consultancy is reporting that profitability of homes is rising. Our Treasury friends will not have missed that. A key reason, paradoxically, is that closure of some homes – and overall capacity is falling – is increasing occupancy rates in the others.
But if there should be nothing for social care in Hammond’s statement, or if there is too little to make much difference, the consequences can only be bad: bad for councils, which are braced for an onslaught of legal challenges as it becomes clear that they cannot fulfil their duties under the Care Act; bad for the NHS, as hospital beds fill this winter with older people who could and should be receiving care and support at home; and, above all, bad for anyone who cannot afford to pay for their own care and support.
The distressing scenes of ill-treatment seen in BBC Panorama’s secret filming inside two Cornish care homes this week will only be repeated again and again as long as the care system remains underfunded, underskilled and undervalued by the rest of society.
Even the Care Quality Commission has stood up and bravely warned of a system almost at tipping point
The Liberal Democrats are poised to become the first major political party to back a dedicated new tax to help rescue the NHS from its deep financial problems.
The party is about to start examining the wisdom and practicalities of introducing a ringfenced tax which would involve a one pence increase in either income tax or National Insurance.
The party has recruited a panel of senior doctors and NHS experts to advise it on how what it calls “a dedicated NHS and care tax” would help ease the health service’s decade-long financial squeeze.
Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem health spokesman, will on Saturday tell party activists gathered at its annual conference in Brighton that there is a very strong case for embracing the move, despite the political risk inherent in a tax rise.
“The uncomfortable truth is that we are falling further behind other European countries in how much we spend on health and care. So let’s look at the case for a dedicated health and care tax, shown on your pay packet,” Lamb will say.
“We must be honest with the British people. If we believe that more money is needed, if we conclude that we all need to pay perhaps an extra penny in the pound, then we must be prepared to say it. We must give this [idea] proper consideration,” he will add.
The Treasury has estimated that a 1p rise in income tax would raise £3.9bn this year, rising to £4.5bn next year and then £4.6bn in 2018-19. Without major reforms to how care is provided, the NHS in England is facing a £22bn gap in its finances by 2020-21.
The party’s “new Beveridge group” of advisers will include Dr Clare Gerada, the outspoken ex-chair of the Royal College of GPs, who recently defected to the Lib Dems from Labour; Prof Dinesh Bhugra, an ex-president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; and Prof Nick Bosanquet, an expert in health economics at Imperial College London who has also worked with Reform, the right-of-centre thinktank that works on public sector reform.
Prof Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, welcomed the Lib Dems’ consideration of the move as a sign of realism at Westminster that the NHS in England cannot survive intact without receiving more money than the £10bn extra it is due by 2020-21.
“It is not possible for the NHS to continue to meet rising demand for services and maintain current standards of care without additional funding,” said Ham. “Increasing funding for health and social care is affordable if hard choices are made about how to find the additional resources needed.
“As the party conference season begins, it is essential that all the parties face up to the need for an honest debate about how to provide adequate funding to meet future needs for health and social care,” he added.
Lamb will tell delegates that health and social care need special treatment in government spending because, unlike other public services, the costs involved are rising relentlessly by about 4% a year, due to the ageing and growing population and rise of lifestyle-related conditions such as obesity and lung diseases.
Government sources indicated that ministers were unlikely to embrace an NHS-specific tax rise any time soon.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “On the back of a strong economy, we are giving the NHS the £10bn it asked for to fund its own plan for the future, including almost £4bn this year to transform services and improve standards of care.
“We know the NHS is under pressure because of our ageing population, but we rightly expect hospitals to have a grip on their finances and continue to ensure patients get treated quickly.”
New York state has reopened the window for workers and volunteers seeking compensation for lost wages and medical benefits arising from their involvement in the rescue, recovery and clean-up at the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
A law signed by the Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the attacks that caused the collapse of the twin towers in lower Manhattan, extends the claims filing deadline until 11 September 2018. It lapsed two years ago.
“We still feel the pain and the loss like it was yesterday, and the thousands of brave men and women who stepped up in our darkest hour are still grappling with the after-effects,” Cuomo said at the signing in Manhattan.
The law also authorizes new claims for related injuries and illnesses since the attacks through this year’s anniversary for workers’ compensation, disability and accidental death benefits that were disallowed because of late filing.
This weekend, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the time of 9/11, former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, told the Guardian she was sorry for the agency’s advice in the aftermath of the attacks that the air around Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe.
“Whatever we got wrong, we should acknowledge and people should be helped,” she said, adding that she still “feels awful” about the tragedy and its aftermath.
“I’m very sorry that people are sick,” she said. “I’m very sorry that people are dying and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry. We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”
Dr Jim Melius, a member of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, said: “Within the next five years we will be at the point where more people have died from World Trade Center-related illnesses than died from the immediate impact of the attacks.”
Almost 3,000 people were killed on 9/11 in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington, and in the crash of a fourth hijacked airliner in a field in Pennsylvania.
Melius, who is also a doctor at the New York State Laborers Union, an adviser to the White House on worker health and chair of the steering committee overseeing the government health program for 9/11 responders, added: “There are a lot of people who are very, very ill with lung disease who will see at least 10 years taken from their normal life span.
“We are already seeing many more premature deaths occurring, and among younger people, from the cancers. There is going to be a new generation of widows and widowers.”
At the bill signing on Sunday, Sal Turturici, who attended in a wheelchair, said of the extension: “It’s going to help a lot of people who are in harm’s way right now. They’re on the end of losing their benefits because they’re running out of time or running out of any grants or any kind of time to get to extend their pay, so they’re falling off the payroll.”
Turturici’s wife, a fire department paramedic like her husband, said he was diagnosed on 4 October with terminal cancer. Wendi Turturici said Cuomo had given her hope that she can take care of their three young children and give her husband peace.
Thousands of people who aided in the rescue and recovery effort were found to have respiratory ailments and other health problems in the years after the attacks. Cancer has remained the biggest fear for people exposed to the gritty soot at the site.
The epidemic of Alzheimer’s takes an enormous toll. The disease ravages the brain, robbing people of memory and awareness, and disconnecting them from those they love. And it’s increasing: according to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s is now the 6th leading cause of death in the U.S. Some 5.4 million Americans now suffer from it, affecting millions of households. But the race to find treatments is uncovering many promising new developments, including black currants. The powerful antioxidants in these tiny, dark berries may help slow the disease’s damage, and prolong lives.
An Assault on the Brain
Of all the dementia cases in the U.S., Alzheimer’s accounts for some 80 percent. The disease results in badly reduced mental abilities and tragic, debilitating memory loss. Researchers have linked Alzheimer’s to abnormal clumps in the brain, known as amyloid plaques, and tangled bundles of fibers called neurofibrillary tangles. The specific role these plaques and tangles play in the disease is not entirely known. But scientists believe they help block communication among nerve cells and disrupt the vital processes those cells need to survive. The death of these nerve cells is what causes the devastating symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
Protection in Black Currant Extract
What makes black currant so promising in the fight against Alzheimer’s is its concentration of potent anti-oxidants. These anthocyanins may help prevent the degradation of blood vessels and Alzheimer’s-related dementia. Cholesterol build-up in the walls of blood vessels causes a reduced flow of blood to the brain, which can cause vascular dementia.
Researchers presented a promising paper to the American Heart Association, showing that anthocyanins from black currant extract may have beneficial effects. A membrane-enriched black currant extract, supplied by Iprona AG under their BerryPharma brand, was tested for its effect on the arteries. The study compared the effects of the extract to the effects of a placebo. The extract helped improve flow, and resulted in a decrease of the plaques associated with the disease.
Reducing Protein Levels in the Brain
A study on mice with Alzheimer’s disease was recently published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Researchers fed one group of mice anthocyanin-enriched bilberry and black currant extracts, and the other group a control diet. As a result, the mice fed the extracts showed far lower brain protein levels than the mice fed the control diet. These proteins — called asamyloid precursor proteins (APP) — are thought to be a key risk factor for Alzheimer’s. The mice who were fed the extracts also showed far less spatial memory loss than the mice fed the control diet.
Delaying the Damages of Aging
Tufts University research, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, studied the effects of high-antioxidant fruits on oxidative stress in brain cells — another factor linked to risk of Alzheimer’s. The study found that these fruit extracts (such as black currant, boysenberry, cranberry, strawberry, dried plum, and grape) had a strong protective effect. It was noted that the high levels of anthocyanins and polyphenols in dark berries may help protect aging brain cells, slowing the onset of Alzheimer’s.
A Traditional Cure
Black currant has long been a traditional cure, used to treat digestive ailments, colds, and flu. Black currant seed oil is an increasingly popular anti-inflammatory. But now it’s clear that this little berry may also help fight the devastating effects of cognitive decline. We’re learning more about ways to help stay healthy as we age, including the importance of keeping our minds and bodies busy. We’re also learning about the power in natural ingredients. By midcentury, reports the Alzheimer’s Association, someone in the U.S. will develop the disease every 33 seconds. The news that black currants hold so much potential is promising indeed.
Registered nurses are delaying retirement, a perform determination that will aid make new accountable care models and the move away from charge-for-service medicine a lot more achievable beneath the Reasonably priced Care Act.
The choices by nurses to continue operating well into their late 60s and longer than they have in the past is assisting boost the nation’s provide of registered nurses (RNs), in accordance to a new study by the RAND Corporation, published on-line this afternoon in the journal Well being Affairs.
Virtually a quarter, or 24 percent of registered nurses, had been working as late as age 69. The trend has helped extend nursing careers by two.five many years soon after age 50 and “increased the 2012 RN workforce by 136,000 folks,” RAND researchers say.
These function alternatives will be vital given the worsening doctor shortage and reimbursement changes by government and personal insurers to inspire the use of more allied well being experts such as RNs, nurse practitioners, doctor assistants and pharmacists to meet the demand of a lot more newly insured Americans below the well being law.
Health insurance coverage companies, employers and government health plans are coaxing Americans a lot more towards a technique of population wellness via patient-centered health-related residences and accountable care organizations and away from classic charge-for-support medicine that encourages pointless tests and procedures. Below the new so-referred to as value-based mostly approaches of accountable care, primary care companies function more difficult, generally as a more coordinated crew, to keep sufferers out of the hospital, ensuring they are taking their medications and receiving care upfront in a doctor’s workplace, a wellness center or even a retail clinic.
ACOs and other new designs of health care delivery, which are pushed by the greatest of insurance coverage companies like Aetna Aetna (AET), Cigna Cigna (CI), Humana Humana (HUM), UnitedHealth Group UnitedHealth Group (UNH) and Blue Cross and Blue Shield strategies, see registered nurses being a crucial component of the staff that helps the physician coordinate care.
“ACA-induced changes in care delivery, mixed with the Medicaid and marketplace insurance expansions that have begun, suggest that there will be an enhance in the demand for RNs in care coordination, management, and ambulatory care positions,” Auerbach and co-authors Peter Buerhaus of Vanderbilt University and Douglas Staiger of Darmouth University wrote in their six-web page article published in the August situation of Wellness Affairs.
The boost in nursing comes from a number of diverse forces this kind of as a main focus on enhancing nurse schooling. That far more than doubled the variety of nurses to 181,000 in 2012 from about 74,000 in 2002, RAND explained.
However much more than 85 percent of nurses under 30 operate in hospitals, RAND researchers say they move to and are interested in doing work outdoors of the hospital as they age. Hence, employers will uncover this shift a welcome growth.
“Older RNs are far far more probably to work outdoors of the hospital than younger RNs are – and thus the big number of older RNs searching for nonhospital employment could be a welcome improvement for nonhospital organizations that are looking for RNs,” the study’s authors wrote. “Hospital-based mostly RNs are often properly versed in competencies involving patient transitions and care coordination.”
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The NHS was founded as a noble experiment in compassion. The principle of care from cradle to grave, free of charge at the stage of delivery, was as revolutionary as it was fair. But society has modified enormously because 1948, and Britain’s wellness service has to adapt to hold up. Sadly, there is mounting evidence that it is failing to meet the increasing expectations not only of individuals, but also of personnel.
In an post for The Telegraph, David Prior, the chairman of the Care High quality Commission (CQC), details some of the difficulties. Mr Prior clearly loves the NHS and he writes not as a critic, but as a pal. Nevertheless what he says is damning. He reveals that a survey of one hundred,000 workers found that 1 in four mentioned they had suffered bullying, harassment or abuse from colleagues or managers. Elements of the NHS have “developed a culture that doesn’t listen or, worse, which stigmatises and ostracises these who raise concerns or complaints”. In truth, some personnel really “delight in the ritual humiliation of people deemed to fail”, although tolerating outdated operating practices and “old-fashioned hierarchies”.
The result that this has on discouraging whistleblowing is of certain concern to individuals. At the inquiry into the scandal at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Basis Believe in – with hundreds more deaths than would have been expected, amid appalling failings of care – a nurse stated that she had been physically threatened. A senior advisor claimed that he was suspended following raising worries, which he regarded as a blatant work to silence him. It was all element, he mentioned, of a “palpable culture of intimidation”.
Combine this culture with wider monetary and management issues in the NHS, and the correct scale of the issue emerges. It is equally troubling, as the Telegraph reported yesterday, to discover that nearly half of hospitals assume to end the financial year in debt.
David Cameron based a massive portion of his electoral appeal in 2010 on his affection for the NHS, and the Government produced a dedication to ring-fence its budget. Lately, however, the Conservatives have acknowledged the need to have for adjust. For instance, Jeremy Hunt, the Overall health Secretary, has tried to identify good and bad practice by way of league tables. It was also Mr Hunt who gave the CQC greater powers to operate independently from the Government, encouraging individuals this kind of as Mr Prior to communicate freely.
But in several areas of NHS management, we require to see dramatically new contemplating. Mr Prior has some intriguing recommendations. Transparency is important: reporting mistakes and close to-misses has to be created simpler. Mr Prior argues that hospital chief executives need to remain in their posts longer, to tackle prolonged-phrase problems better. He suggests higher competition for the delivery of care, and favours successful hospitals taking in excess of failing ones. Most of all, he would like a adjust in the inner workings of the NHS that will end the divide amongst employees and management, and tackle the culture of bullying. His ambition is welcome. An NHS fit for the 21st century has to be more open and far more rigorous in its standards. It should put the sufferers initial.
Mr Carpenter, who had four grandchildren, suffered with diabetes and had not been out of his home in a cul-de-sac in Dover, Kent, for 3 years, neighbours mentioned.
His daughter, Beverley Spicer, said: “He was a bit of a wheeler dealer, you would have noticed him around Dover in his white van and then his pride and joy, his Mercedes car.
“He would in no way be seen with no his dog Sammy, and following Sammy passed away his next beloved puppy Peanut, but in the last ten years his well being and fitness deteriorated which left him a lot more and far more housebound.”
Stewart Underdown, a childhood good friend, explained Mr Carpenter was close friends with top wrestlers Large Daddy and Giant Haystacks and on a tour to India received far more press coverage than the Queen, who was going to at the very same time.
He stated: “He wrestled in front of 100,000 folks out there and was referred to as ‘Clive of England’ in their press.
“He told me a funny story about when he signed an autograph for a child but had no idea how to spell ‘Car-gantula’, so he just did a scrawl, but the kid was pleased sufficient.
