
Drug consumption facilities: they’ve been around since 1986 and now Scotland has one – but do they work?
It has taken more than ten years of wrangling, but the UK’s first legal drug-consumption facility has finally opened in Glasgow. These facilities offer a safe, clean place for people to use illicit drugs, usually by injection, in the presence...
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Helsinki Declaration: Healthy Volunteers and Risk
Across the globe, thousands of interventional clinical trials take place every year and many healthy participants are recruited to participate in such trials. Participation in these interventional clinical trials is not without ethical concerns, and many who take part are...
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Adolescents struggle with their mental health: blame austerity, not parents
(or To help understand adolescents’ mental health, look (also) at the benefit system) In the run-up to the 2010 UK general election, David Cameron declared that “what matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their...
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Lived experience and social welfare policy
In the UK, there is a clear policy imperative to facilitate greater participation in contemporary public policy making in part to address a purported democratic deficit, both locally and nationally. This is most evident in the context of health policy,...
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Why is work bad for you?
Work forms a major part of our lives. It provides so much and simultaneously so little. It pays the bills, provides some form of structure to the day or night depending on the type of work, and can form a...
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“Mental health culture” has not gone far enough – long term failures in mental health policy
A long-standing notion in UK policy has been that increased public awareness can improve national mental health. Notable campaigns include the Mental Health Foundation Mental Health Awareness Week launched in 2001; England’s Time to Change campaign (2007-2021); and Heads Together...
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Cutting their teeth in government- why the Labour Party will fail on tooth decay
Whilst it may be some way from being the most glamorous debate in political economy, the issue of tooth decay is instructive of a larger systemic problem in the relationship between pre-general election party policy and the future of the...
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Mental Health Culture
“Mental health culture has gone too far, says Mel Stride”. This was the title of an article published in The Telegraph towards the end of March, that certainly generated a fair amount of attention on my Twitter feed, at least....
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Will a controversial new data platform change how the NHS “thinks”?
It was announced last year that the controversial tech firm Palantir had won a huge new contract with the NHS to provide a digital platform for the management of health data. The company will provide the NHS with a new...
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Psychiatric health services in trouble: a pregnant psychotic patient
Since the pandemic, I’ve had plenty of contact with psychiatric services as my child has struggled with unstable mental health. So, I went to a new exhibition by a former psychiatric patient with personal as well as academic interest. Entitled...
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The NHS in Late Soviet Britain
We are now at the unprecedented point where private hospitals are doing one in ten planned NHS operations in England. This marks a 50% increase in elective procedures outsourced to private providers since 2019 (before COVID), leading some to claim...
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Proposals to regulate NHS Managers: a consultation