Health

Re Wes Streeting’s ambitions (Wes Streeting defends Labour plan to use private sector to cut NHS backlog, 12 April), I worked two sessions a week as a GP specialist in endoscopy at our local NHS hospital. Two things were a constant source of irritation. First, the work was poorly remunerated and did not cover my absence from my practice. Second, the lists I worked were sub-optimally organised, with elective outpatient cases mixed with emergency inpatient cases, causing several patients long waits on the day of their endoscopy.Consequently, myself and colleagues established our own community endoscopy service purely for NHS patients. From the start we offered transnasal gastroscopy, which is relatively new, results in less gagging, and seldom needed sedation. We developed a seamless referr...

When I first became her patient, I heard everything my therapist said as a criticism. Almost every word that came out of her mouth, I received as a telling off, a character assassination or a low mark. I thought to myself: “I’m paying this woman to help me and all she’s doing is criticising me! How rude!”Here’s a made-up example that has a lot of truth in it: if I lost my mobile phone and described my feelings of panic, she might respond with something along the lines of: “You crazy woman, can you not be more robust? How can you be overwhelmed by something like losing your phone? Can you not be more chill? More resilient? Thank God my other patients are not this basic.”Except … she hadn’t said that. With time – and it felt like a really, really long time – therapy allowed me to see that w...

Surviving victims and relatives of those who died as a result of receiving infected blood and blood products from the NHS in the 1970s and 80s will gather in a few weeks at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.After six years of taking evidence, Sir Brian Langstaff’s public inquiry will finally unveil its report there on 20 May.There is no doubt that what occurred was a tragedy and scandal, indeed one of the very worst in this country’s history. Thousands were killed, including children, after being infected with HIV and hepatitis. Many more lives were ruined. And there has been no shortage of apologies in recent years. As the then prime minister, David Cameron, told the House of Commons in 2015: “To each and every one of these people I would like to say sorry on behalf of the govern...