Jacqui Wise

New testimony gathered by the BMA details instances of physician associates (PAs) and anaesthesia associates (AAs) making incorrect clinical decisions, dangerously prescribing medication, introducing themselves as doctors, and taking part in surgical procedures for which they were not qualified.1The BMA said that the scale of the evidence it had gathered through an online reporting portal between November 2023 and February 2025 showed that the NHS had failed in its duty to ensure patient safety. The 600 reports of serious concerns gathered by the BMA have been submitted as evidence to the government commissioned Leng review.23 But the BMA said that the NHS must introduce urgent interim measures while the review is ongoing, including an immediate halt to recruitment of PAs and AAs, implementation of the BMA’s safe scope of practice and supervision guidance, …

Experts have called for a new alcohol strategy for England as deaths from alcohol reached a record high in 2023, with the average heavy drinker now older.An analysis by the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation showed 8273 deaths from alcohol in England in 2023, up from 5050 in 2006—a 60% increase.1 These were deaths from conditions caused entirely by alcohol consumption, including alcoholic liver disease and accidental poisoning. A further 14 370 deaths in 2023 were from conditions caused partially by alcohol.The current upward trend in deaths began in 2020 at the start of the covid pandemic, when 6984 deaths were recorded in the year.The UK’s last national alcohol strategy was published in 2012 and focused much of …

The latest infant mortality data for England and Wales continue to show a stark difference between the most and least deprived areas and between ethnic groups.There were 2320 infant deaths (aged under 1 year) and 961 child deaths (aged 1 to 15) in England and Wales in 2023, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.1 These figures are lower than in 2022 when there were 2349 infant deaths and 1019 child deaths.This equates to an infant mortality rate of 3.9 deaths per 1000 live births which is unchanged from 2022, and child mortality of 9 deaths per 100 000—down from 10 in 2022.Between 1980 and 2014 …

The Royal College of Physicians has said it is “disappointing” that new General Medical Council guidance does not state that physician associates (PAs) must be supervised by a senior doctor.The BMA has also criticised the GMC’s new good practice advice for doctors who supervise and work with PAs and anaesthesia associates (AAs), calling it an “unhelpful contribution.”1Both the RCP and BMA argue that PAs should be supervised only by senior doctors such as consultants, GPs, and autonomously practising specialist or associate specialist doctors and never by doctors in training. But the GMC’s new guidance suggests that other healthcare professionals …

People in the most deprived areas of England are almost twice as likely to be admitted to hospital for infectious disease as those in least deprived areas, a report from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has found.1It also found that people from more deprived areas were disproportionately affected by radiation, chemical, climate, and environmental hazards that have direct health effects as well as exacerbating existing medical conditions. Areas with high deprivation typically have higher levels of air pollution than less deprived and less ethnically diverse areas.The report highlights how poor infectious disease outcomes are unevenly distributed across ethnic groups. For example, emergency hospital admission rates for tuberculosis were 29 times as high among people classed as “Asian other,” 27 times as high in the Indian group, and 15 times as high in the Black African group, when compared with the White British group.Emergency admission …

The BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee in England has announced it will ballot its members on industrial action over pay, stating “no doctor today is worth less than they were 17 years ago.”In April resident doctors re-entered a pay dispute with the government,1 saying that key provisions of last year’s agreements had not been upheld to restore real terms pay levels to those of 2008.The BMA said that basic pay for resident doctors had fallen by 22.3% in real terms since 2008-09.The ballot will open on 27 May and close on 7 July 2025. If returned with a yes vote then the mandate for industrial action would last from July 2025 to January 2026.Melissa Ryan and Ross Nieuwoudt, co-chairs of the Resident Doctors Committee, met the health and social care secretary, Wes Streeting, on 2 May …

MPs have criticised the lack of a clear plan for the forthcoming abolition of NHS England and the halving of staff in integrated care boards across the country, demanding that the government set out how such a major structural change will affect key services.The report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on the Department for Health and Social Care accounts for 2023-24 said that the government “lacks a grip of the financial pressures it faces and lacks adequate plans for key areas of spend and activity.”1 It said the department’s annual report was late again and contained too little information on plans for social care, the move to prevention of ill health, and how to harness technological advances to improve the NHS’s productivity.In March the government announced that NHS England would be …

Not quite. The term refers to digital “smart scale” technology currently being piloted by 15 specialist NHS clinics to support severely obese children to lose weight.1The idea is that the young person is encouraged to stand on the scale at home every day. But instead of displaying numbers the scale connects to a mobile app to visually display whether weight is going up or down. The data are automatically transferred to the patient’s clinical team who can keep in touch with …

An infant with a rare genetic condition made headlines last week after successfully receiving personalised CRISPR therapy. Jacqui Wise summarises what we know so far about the breakthroughUS doctors have developed and safely delivered a customised gene editing therapy to treat a baby boy with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency, diagnosed soon after birth. The condition, which affects only one in 1.3 million people, is characterised by an inability to fully break down byproducts from protein metabolism in the liver. This causes a build up of ammonia to toxic levels that can cause severe damage to the liver and brain. Treatment includes a low protein diet until the child is old enough to receive a liver transplant. However, during the waiting period there is a risk of rapid organ failure. The disorder is estimated to kill about half of those children affected in early infancy.CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a technology that allows precise changes to DNA …

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has criticised “truly shocking” police guidance detailing how to search women’s homes for abortifacient drugs and seize phones to look for period trackers in cases involving sudden unexpected pregnancy loss.The Practice Advice on Child Death Investigation from the National Police Chiefs’ Council was published in January but has only just come to public attention.1 It replaces 2014 guidance that did not mention investigating stillbirths and had one mention of investigating women who may have had an illegal termination. The new version has eight pages covering stillbirths and termination of pregnancy outside legally permitted circumstances.It comes as women’s reproductive rights are increasingly under the spotlight. Earlier this month 45 year old Nicola Packer was cleared of illegally terminating a pregnancy after taking abortion pills during the covid lockdown.2 She is one of six women in the UK who have appeared in court over the past two years charged with ending their own pregnancy. Before this, only three convictions had been reported of an illegal abortion since the current law was introduced in 1861.3An amendment laid to the Crime and Policing Bill that is currently making its way through parliament would decriminalise abortion up …