Each year I teach a lecture on gender and health to my third-year students.   Alongside ideas of gender roles and norms, gendered power relations and the move from a binary to a spectrum understanding of gender, I introduce the idea of gendered health inequalities, the pay and status gaps and the impact of austerity.  And […]

This week the UN Committee on the Rights of Disabled Persons (CRPD) published the results of an investigation that found that UK reforms to welfare have led to “grave and systematic violations” of disability rights. In the same week a range of other stories have made the headlines in the UK media: Two disabled families […]

In October 2015 I wrote about the implications of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader standing on the pledge of a new “kinder politics and a more caring society”.  I talked about the glimmer of hope offered by policies which focused on tackling the social determinants of health, reducing inequality and improving […]

Every Saturday in countries across the world groups of amateur and less amateur runners get together to run 2 or 5 km around a park.  In 2004, Paul Sinron developed Parkrun, and the first event involved 13 people running in Teddington UK.  Two years later, there are over 98,000 Parkrun events worldwide, involving 1,516,302 runners […]

I got a new watch for Christmas. It tells me how far I walk each day, how many calories I burn off through movement and it reminds me to stand up and move around every hour. It rewards me when I meet the targets set for me each day and quietly ignores me if I […]

Jeremy Corbyn stood for election as the leader of the UK Labour party on the pledge of a new “kinder politics and a more caring society”. Taken at face value it seems difficult to see how anyone can argue, or be seen to argue, against this. But what are the implications of this new politics […]

This week in the media dentists are being accused of greed, false advertising, hiding prices and misleading patients about their services.  Headlines included: ‘How greedy dentists are fleecing families’ and ‘Dentists falsely advertise NHS slots then refuse to offer appointments’.  Dentists have hit back stating that the NHS payment system is so complicated it is […]

Figures released last week showed a shortfall of one thousand General Practitioners (GPs) in England. In the same week NHS England announced that it would spend £10 million on a range of new schemes to encourage older GPs to put off retirement and encourage those who have left the profession, or the country, to return […]

Each year the country comes together in mass acts of philanthropy, raising money in all kinds of inventive, extraordinary and impressive ways to help children who are less fortunate than they are.  Each year a significant amount of money is raised and invaluable services provided by charities are secured for another year.  Each year I […]

Browsing for articles on the concept of the ‘good patient’ I came across an article by American Asset Protection Specialist entitled ‘Get Rid of Bad Patients’. In it he listed 5 types of patient who should be fired. These included: Problem patients who complain, are negative or abusive. Patients who miss appointments, fail to pay […]