Wellbeing Influencers and The Skewing of Public Health Discourse
Why Capitalism, Not Seed Oil, is the Problem It’s a familiar format on TikTok and other social media platforms. An earnest young man enters a supermarket. He walks down a deserted aisle (they’re always deserted; you never see another shopper)....
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Systemic Betrayal, Moral Injury and Distress in Community Food Support
“I think the other side of it is, you think ‘I can’t bear being just such a small part in such an enormous problem’ and that that weighs heavily, very heavily”. “So, we regrettably had to make decisions about how...
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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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Public Fears Of Getting Old: Is society making us scared of ageing?
We live in times of heightened societal fears of ageing. Ageing is seen as both a process and a state that we must vigilantly monitor and slow down, however, we cannot avoid it. Youthfulness, and its perceived vigour, are to...
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Around a million children in the UK are living in destitution
Around a million children in the UK are living in destitution – with harmful consequences for their development. Millions of people in the UK are unable to meet their most basic physical needs: to stay warm, dry, clean and fed....
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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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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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Understanding Health Inequalities in Scotland – Getting Beyond Death and Despair in (Quantified) Data
Two high profile reports on health inequalities in Scotland were launched last month. The first, Leave No One Behind(a Health Foundation report), aimed to provide a multi-dimensional, up-to-date analysis of health inequalities in Scotland. The second, Closing the Gap (from...
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Universal credit changes: increasing pressure on part-time workers is the wrong move at the worst time
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has laid out the government’s “mini budget”, a package of tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthiest in Britain. But people on the other end of the income scale are facing changes too. Kwarteng announced that...
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Why Workplaces Still Fail Disabled People (and What Needs to Change)