When you wait 12+ hours to see a doctor in A&E, remember that 12 other doctors applied to be that doctor and got turned away.
Doctors are unemployed and cannot find work, whilst last night ambulances waited 6+ hours outside my A&E to be seen.
That is why Doctors are striking.
Heartbroken to read today’s @NAOorguk report describing the postcode lottery of care faced by dying people in Britain.
Two thirds of charitable hospices are in debt. Services are being slashed everywhere & hospices forced to cut their staff & beds.
How can it possibly be right that hospices only receive 25-33% of their funding from the NHS?
Perhaps the worst thing about this report is the government’s response to it, namely the glib one-liner: “We recognise there is more to do, and we are exploring how we can improve the access, quality and sustainability of all-age palliative care and end of life care in line with the 10-year health plan.”
Well guess how many times the word “palliative” appears in the 10 Year Plan.
Only once.
For shame.
Is this really the country Britain has become? A Labour government, like its Conservative predecessors, continuing to inflict avoidable suffering on the terminally ill, because it refuses to fund adequate palliative care?
I believe the cardinal measure of whether a country is civilised is how it chooses to treat its most vulnerable members.
And I see with my own eyes how grimly palliative care patients are being failed, @wesstreeting & @Keir_Starmer.
A recall a patient who waited 2 YEARS for a knee replacement
He was a self employed builder
Due to his severe knee pain he lost his job. After a year lost his home which led to his depression
Want to get the sick back into work - employ drs & solve the NHS waiting list crisis!
Proud to contribute frontline testimony to tonight's enraging @ITVX documentary "The Covid Contracts: Follow the Money".
Boris Johnson's government squandered £8.7 billion on unusable PPE - while nurses wore bin bags, NHS staff started dying, and grifters like Michelle Mone saw an opportunity to make millions.
We were given masks whose ear loops fell off & aprons so flimsy they ripped apart when you tried to put them on.
NHS staff stepped up - like so many millions of ordinary, decent Britons across the country.
I will never stop being sickened by the greed, immorality and absolute cynicism of the minority who saw a global pandemic as their chance for easy money.
Tonight, 10.15pm, ITV1.
If you want to see Michelle Mone kicked out of the House of Lords and arrested until she pays the £232,000,000 she owes give this a RT.
If you want Rishi Sunak's involvement in the £14,900,000,000 PPE Fraud he covered up investigated, LIKE.
When time is short, every moment counts. Sometimes, what matters most at the bedside isn’t morphine, other drugs or medical interventions but simple human - or, in this case - canine connection.
I am sharing Cookie's photo with permission. You can just glimpse her master behind her.
He had two dying wishes: to be reunited with the dog he loved & to end his days at home, surrounded by the love of his family.
Cookie, of course, was rushed to the hospital stat 😊.
Then multiple teams moved heaven & earth to get oxygen, meds, carers, equipment & logistics in place at home.
This enabled our patient to go home that same morning, just in time.
It was palliative care at its best - resolute, collegiate, focused entirely on what mattered to the patient.
In the most profound sense, we only die once. Here's to care, humanity and creativity at the bedside ❤️🐕
❗️ALERT❗️@gbsumudflotilla has been attacked 7 times in a short span! Boats hit with sound bombs, explosive flares, and sprayed with suspected chemicals. Radios jammed, calls for help blocked. Immediate international attention AND PROTECTION required!
Hands off the Flotilla!
If Tories want a 'Tax Investigation' into Angela Rayner, fine.
First, let's do Nadhim Zahawi, Sajid Javid, Nadine Dorries, Rishi Sunak, George Osborne, Liam Fox, Priti Patel, Sir Geoffrey Cox, Lord Ashcroft, Boris Johnson, etc, etc.
And the systematic Covid Fraud.
As a GP, I am not allowed to receive a pen or post-it note pad from a pharmaceutical company rep
The Government banned them in case I was influenced to prescribe a certain medication
This should also be banned @wesstreeting unless you have a way to justify this?
This "debate" about who should use what toilet doesn’t benefit anyone. It doesn’t fix the underfunding of women's refuges, NHS waiting lists leaving women in terrible pain, mums skipping meals to feed their kids. How about we get on with tackling the real issues affecting women?
liz kendall says these benefit cuts will save the govt £5bn by 2030.
billionaire jim ratcliffe avoided a £4bn tax bill by changing his tax domicile from hampshire to monaco.
politics!
I simply cannot believe that the time available to MPs to debate a decision that could led to thousands of people receiving state assistance in ending their lives prematurely is… 5 hours.
Nor that an argument currently doing the rounds in parliament to win over uncertain MPs is that we “already have” outstanding palliative care in the UK, so nobody fails to receive the best care. We do not. We are so, so far from it. UK palliative care in 2024 is a desperately under-resourced Cinderella service and this is causing untold avoidable suffering for patients who sometimes long to end their lives because WE failed to fund the care that might make life still worth living.
Fix that first - please - then talk about assisted dying.
Please don’t ignore or disbelieve what those of us who work in palliative care witness daily.
To those saying comments like "oh good more money for those who contribute nothing" - check ur facts!
40% of UC claimants are the working poor others are carers, have disabilities or illness, & some who don't have work, want it. A little more compassion & less judgement wouldn't hurt.
WOW! Everyone should listen to this superb maiden speech from newly appointed Prisons, Parole & Probation Minister @JamesTCobbler in the House of Lords today
What an absolutely inspired appointment this is👏👏👏