The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse – one year on, what has changed?
Just over a year ago, at lunchtime on the 20th October 2022, UK news was dominated by the breaking story that Prime Minister Liz Truss had resigned with immediate effect. At the same time and only 2 miles away from...
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Repeat child removals: structural inequality and iatrogenic harm
One in four birth mothers who have a child taken into care in England will re-appear in care proceedings within seven years. Women in this situation have experienced structural disadvantage in multiple domains including socio-economic deprivation, histories of trauma and...
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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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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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The right to convalesce
An extended period of fatigue is a feature of COVID-19, lingering and depleting the body and the mind long after the acute symptoms of infection have come and gone. Fatigue is not just present in what we refer to as...
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Around a million children in the UK are living in destitution