Climate Crisis, Denial and the World Burning
In the film ‘Don’t Look Up’ (2021), a planet-killing comet is on a direct collision course with Earth. Distraught scientists are depicted as struggling unsuccessfully to get politicians, the media, and the public to believe them and act to avert...
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People with intellectual disability are often diagnosed with cancer when it is already well advanced
Many people with intellectual disability are diagnosed with cancer when it has already spread (metastasized) and the odds of survival are lower. Intellectual disability is a lifelong condition that occurs before adulthood where people have a reduced ability to understand new or complex information,...
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The two child benefit cap and the power of the financial markets
The two child benefit cap affects an estimated 1.5 million children across the country. Recent research suggests that as many as one in four children in some of England and Wales’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3,000...
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Pandemic Preparedness, Recovery, and the Vital Role of Social Science
As has become abundantly clear over the last few years, pandemics are social as well as biomedical. Their effects ripple through societies and communities, the result of – and further affecting – societal processes. Consequently, the social sciences have much...
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What’s worth remembering?
On the penultimate page of Rob Delaney’s grief memoir, we get a summary of the story so far: Our boy got sick We went to a lot of doctors, trying to find out what was wrong with him. We found...
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Self harm care: A community consultation
Everyone deserves access to safe and affirming care. The broader literature and anecdotal evidence suggest that safe and affirming care is often absent when it comes to self-harm. In 2020 we (Bathsheba, Courtney, and Veronica) co-founded Make Space, a user-led...
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Losing more than we ever had: The NHS staffing crisis, 4-year degrees and what will be lost
We constantly hear that the NHS is in crisis. Most recently on the news agenda has been the NHS staffing crisis with a chronic lack of doctors, nurses, technicians and many areas of the NHS workforce. The Conservative government’s latest...
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Rearticulating material inequalities as spatial inequalities (and how to stop it)
In order to assess the current policy approach to addressing inequalities, it is necessary to think critically about the ‘levelling up’ policy context in the UK. To do this, we need to think about changes to dominant ways in which...
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“The Emperor’s New Clothes”: health inequalities in ethnic minority communities
The classic children’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, catches the imagination with its allegory of logical fallacies and fear of and failure to criticise. Still, it is the way it classically embodies society’s seditious reticence, a state where everyone refuses...
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Public Health and the problem with class
Medicine, as a profession, does not recruit equitably from the UK’s population. This matters because working-class young people do not have equal chances of becoming doctors. But it also matters how public health interventions are designed and delivered. All too...
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Artificial Intelligence and Medical Sociology
It is fair to say that there is growing concern about the use of artificial intelligence in almost all facets of our lives. In universities, a lot of this worry centres on the potential use of AI by students and...
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Repeat child removals: structural inequality and iatrogenic harm