Medical Journal News

Doctors in Gaza have been “abandoned by the world” as they continue to struggle to provide basic healthcare amid renewed Israeli airstrikes, a lack of staff and supplies, and under threat of violence and death, a US doctor working at the recently bombed Nasser Hospital has said.Feroze Sidhwa, US trauma surgeon who is volunteering in Gaza with MedGlobal, told a press conference on 26 March that the horrors he has witnessed since entering Gaza on 6 March far exceed anything he has seen during his humanitarian career, including during his three stints in Ukraine since the Russian invasion.“Doctors feel alone. They feel abandoned by the world, and I think rightly so. When Russia bombs a children’s hospital in Kiev, everybody loses their mind, and rightly so,” Sidhwa said. “But what’s going on here is far more severe and they see that the world, and especially the West, just doesn’t seem...

The treatment of around 800 patients by a now suspended consultant paediatric orthopaedic surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge is to be examined by a panel of expert clinicians, after an initial review of complex hip surgery cases over the past two and a half years found that nine children had received substandard care.The external retrospective review will be chaired by Andrew Kennedy KC, an independent barrister who represented the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in the Thirlwall inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the crimes of nurse Lucy Letby.Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Addenbrooke’s, has also commissioned an independent investigation by the specialist company Verita into “whether there were any missed opportunities to have identified concerns and acted earlier,” given that concerns were raised as early as 2015 and were the subject of an external review in 2016.Verita has been asked to look into whether...

The timeline for the proposed introduction of assisted dying in England and Wales could be pushed back to four years, raising fears among supporters that its introduction may be abandoned altogether.An amendment approved by the Commons committee scrutinising the bill came as the Isle of Man took its final step to legalise assisted dying, the first area of the British Isles to do so. The Isle of Man Assisted Dying Bill 2023 will now be sent for royal assent before an implementation period begins, with assisted dying potentially available to terminally ill residents from 2027.The deferral in England and Wales was proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP behind the private member’s bill. She proposed the amendment to change the maximum implementation period from two to four years after consulting with civil servants, who advised that more time would be needed to set up training and systems for the new...

The NHS is relying too much on recruiting doctors and nurses from countries that have their own significant healthcare workforce shortages instead of training and retaining enough domestic staff, a damning report has concluded.By November 2024 around one in eleven NHS doctors in England (9%) held a nationality from a “red list” country—those listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as having such a shortage of staff that other countries should not actively recruit from them—found the report from the Nuffield Trust think tank and academics from the University of Sheffield, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of Michigan.1The report, funded by the Health Foundation, found that since Brexit all UK countries had relied heavily on very high migration of healthcare staff from outside the EU.Mark Dayan, Nuffield Trust policy analyst and Brexit programme lead, told The BMJ, “Yet again, British failure to train enough healthcare staff has been bailed...

As paediatricians working in the US, we view the changes being made to our healthcare and education systems, research enterprise, and regulatory agencies1 as truly dystopian.The damage is clear to us. The breakdown of information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; unjustified firing of workers from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency; decreasing the funding of university research through the National Institutes of Health; dismantling the US Agency for International Development; and withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement have disproportionately adverse effects on children. Children will suffer from diseases and disabilities that otherwise could be prevented and treated, a dire consequence of policies adopted by the very federal government entrusted with promoting and protecting their health, development, and functioning.Dictators have historically used health as a target to destroy the core strength of their...

In this episode of Sharp Scratch, the panel got together to discuss the importance of properly listening to patients.The panel was joined by guest Rageshri Dhairyawan to explore how medical students and doctors can work to improve their listening by increasing their awareness of biases that may lead to some groups of patients being dismissed. The episode highlighted the broader implications of not properly hearing patients, including the impact on health equity. The discussion also covered the challenges of dealing with uncertainty and acknowledging the social factors that can affect healthcare outcomes. The episode emphasised the ways in which becoming a better listener as a medical professional can help us to provide more compassionate and holistic care.Rageshri Dhairyawan is a consultant in sexual health and HIV medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust and deputy director of the SHARE Collaborative for Health Equity, Queen Mary University of London. She is author...

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New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

Rising cases of tuberculosis (TB) and measles and an intense influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season were seen in England in 2024-25, reiterating the fact that “we cannot be complacent,” the outgoing head of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said.The agency’s first report on infectious diseases looks at data from 2023 to early 2025 and acknowledges that social mixing, international travel, migration, and vaccine hesitancy following the covid-19 pandemic have contributed to these patterns of infection.1Provisional data for 2024 show that there were 600 new cases of TB in England in 2024, 13% more than in 2023. This followed an 11% increase in cases in 2023, with 4855 notifications of the disease compared with 4380 in 2022.If cases of TB continue to increase on their current trajectory the UK would lose its World Health Organisation low incidence status, warned Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UKHSA, at...

Decades of progress in improving childhood survival are being put at risk because of major cuts to aid funding, the United Nations has warned.In a report1 published on 25 March the UN found that the number of children dying globally before their 5th birthday has more than halved from 10.1m in 2000 to 4.8m in 2023. Stillbirths have declined modestly, from 2.9m in 2000 to 1.9m in 2021.2But it warned that these gains are now under threat as major aid donors such as the US have announced funding cuts. Earlier this month the Trump administration permanently cancelled funding for nearly 10 000 projects supporting global health and development, equating to a cut of nearly $60bn in aid spending.3 US cuts to foreign aid have already closed vital child malnutrition services in war torn Sudan.4World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “In the face of global funding cuts, there...