ADHD UK says over-25s wanting assessment with Coventry and Warwickshire board have no choice but to pay privately

A charity supporting people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is preparing a legal challenge against a regional NHS board that has temporarily stopped accepting referrals for adults over 25.

Coventry and Warwickshire integrated care board said any new referrals for people over 25 would be paused from 21 May to reduce waiting lists for children.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Continue reading...

Hundreds of thousands of hospital appointments could be cancelled if BMA members vote for series of stoppages

Hospitals are bracing for a fresh round of strikes by resident doctors seeking a 29% pay rise, amid warnings that stoppages could lead to hundreds of thousands of appointments and operations being cancelled.

NHS leaders fear that a ballot of resident doctors, formerly junior doctors in England, which closes on Monday will produce a majority backing renewed industrial action.

Continue reading...

They are suffering disproportionately and without help, say researchers, and unless they are given a voice, problems will continue to mount up

• Read more: ‘We’re told we won’t amount to anything’: is it possible to change the fortunes of young people living in England’s coastal towns?

Young people living in the most deprived stretches of England’s coastline are three times more likely to be living with an undiagnosed mental health condition than their peers inland, according to new research.

This “coastal mental health gap” means that young people in these towns, which include areas of Tendring on the east coast and Blackpool and Liverpool to the west, are suffering disproportionately, often alone and with no help, said the researchers who conducted the study.

Continue reading...

Cardiologist who empowered paramedics and the general public to restart hearts and save lives

If you had a cardiac arrest before the 1970s, an ambulance might arrive quickly, but almost all its crew could do was transport you to hospital, where your treatment would begin – if indeed you survived the journey. The cardiologist Douglas Chamberlain, who has died aged 94, realised that in order to start resuscitation in the vital five-minute window after the heart stopped beating, the ambulance crew needed the tools and skills to do it themselves.

Chamberlain’s initiative laid the foundations for the paramedic profession nationally and internationally. Working from a district general hospital in Brighton, he set up an intensive training programme for ambulance crews, equipped ambulances with defibrillators and electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, and demonstrated through a series of rigorously documented studies that the service saved lives. The only other city in the world where non-medical professionals were using defibrillators at the time was Seattle in the US.

Continue reading...

Diquat is banned in the UK, EU, China and other countries. The US has resisted calls to regulate it

The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows.

The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US.

Continue reading...

Testing is difficult for drugs for rare diseases, and new rules may make it harder for sufferers to obtain life-saving drugs

US drug regulators have increasingly signaled a focus on faster approvals and rare diseases, but patients with ultra-rare ailments fear they are falling through the cracks, especially given challenges to conducting clinical trials.

One drug, elamipretide, garnered a narrow recommendation from independent advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the agency rejected the drug’s application in May and recommended another potential pathway for approval.

Continue reading...

Kirsty Dixon from York runs support groups for women going through the menopause.

Relatives tell of their determination to see good come from the killing of their loved ones in 2005 London bombings

In the city of Bhubaneswar, the capital of the north-east Indian state of Odisha, there is an eye clinic that has transformed the lives of thousands of children.

Before the unit was established in 2008, according to its vice-chair, there was no dedicated children’s eye care centre in the entire eastern part of India, a country home to 20% of the world’s blind children. The clinic now sees about 3,000 children a month and performs 350 eye surgeries – a significant proportion of them at no cost to the often very poor families who need them.

Continue reading...

Government announces £500m project to provide single point of access for health, education and wellbeing services

One-stop shop family hubs will be rolled out across England to give parents advice and support, the government has announced. The centres will offer help with breastfeeding and housing issues, as well as supporting children’s early development and language, ministers said.

The £500m project will open 1,000 centres from April 2026, meaning every council in England will have a family hub by 2028. It will build on the existing family hubs and start for life programme to provide a single point of access for services in health, education and wellbeing.

Continue reading...

Their jobs are seen as glamorous but the new reality for many is workplace stress and ‘complete fatigue’

The life of a social media creator can be high in glamour and status. The well-paid endorsement deals, the online followers and proximity to the celebrity establishment are all perks of the industry.

But one hidden cost will be familiar to anyone coping with the 21st-century economy: burnout. The Guardian has spoken to five creators with a combined audience of millions who have all experienced degrees of workplace stress or fatigue.

Continue reading...

Vicky Pebsworth has spent decades saying vaccines caused her son’s autism – a connection refuted by years of research

One of the new members of a critical federal vaccine advisory board has argued for decades that vaccines caused her son’s autism – a connection that years of large-scale studies and reviews refute.

Registered nurse Vicky Pebsworth is one of eight new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip), all hand-picked by the vaccine skeptic and Donald Trump’s health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Continue reading...

Fish or bird ownership showed no significant link to slower cognitive decline in study with implications for ageing societies

As global population ages and dementia rates climb, scientists may have found an unexpected ally in the fight against cognitive decline.

Cats and dogs may be exercising more than just your patience: they could be keeping parts of your brain ticking over too. In a potential breakthrough for preventive health, researchers have found that owning a four-pawed friend is linked to slower cognitive decline by potentially preserving specific brain functions as we grow older.

Continue reading...

Young people are taking dangerous amounts of ket because it's cheap, easily available and helps them "disconnect", experts say.

Young people are taking dangerous amounts of ket because it's cheap, easily available and helps them "disconnect", experts say.

My mother, Sally Adams, who has died aged 73, worked for many years at Papworth hospital in Cambridge, where she was a sister in the intensive therapy unit and was one of the nurses who cared for Keith Castle, the UK’s first successful heart transplant patient, in 1979.

She worked at Papworth from 1975 to 1990 (except for a two-year spell at Treliske hospital in Truro in 1986-88). Then she switched to bereavement counselling until her retirement in 2019.

Continue reading...

Healthy life expectancy for women in most deprived areas falls to the lowest level since recent records began, ONS says

Healthy life expectancy for women in the most deprived areas of England and Wales has fallen to the lowest level since recent records began, with those women now likely to spend only two-thirds of their lives in good health.

Women living in wealthier parts of England are likely to enjoy about two more decades of healthy life, the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data has shown.

Continue reading...

Readers respond to Guardian coverage of health inequalities in Britain and the government’s 10-year plan for the health service

Your articles on health inequality this week included excellent coverage of the government’s project to shift the emphasis of healthcare from treatment at the clinic and hospital to prevention through public health initiatives (Downing Street’s radical plan for the NHS: shifting it from treatment to prevention, 29 June). However, one key element is missing from the analysis that has frustrated the implementation of such necessary innovations: the way that undergraduate students are educated and socialised into medicine within longstanding conservative curricula.

Historically, doctors gain an identity that is grounded in the sanctity of the “clinic” (primarily the hospital) as a well-patrolled territory with idiosyncratic rituals and language. Patients are kept on the other side of the fence. Medical education traditionally affords little work-based experience in the first two years, but after that students gain increasing exposure to clinical work. However, this is largely focused on secondary care (hospital and clinic) settings, and on cure rather than prevention.

Continue reading...

A maternity suite at the University Hospital of Hartlepool is suffering staff shortages.

The healing power of exercise should never be underestimated, but be cautious about what recent headlines seem to suggest

• Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

You might have seen the recent headlines on a new study on exercise and cancer recovery suggesting that “exercise is better than a drug” in preventing cancer returning. Cue a wave of commentary pitting “big pharma” against fitness, as if we must choose between pills and planks. It’s an appealing narrative – but it’s also misleading.

We don’t need to choose between the two. In fact, the best health outcomes often come from combining medicine with a broader view of health that includes movement, diet, social connection and mental wellbeing.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

Continue reading...

Letter from workers, which EPA claims is ‘unlawful’, says agency is no longer living up to its mission

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” about its policies, accusing them of “unlawfully undermining” the Trump administration’s agenda.

In a letter made public on Monday, the employees wrote that the agency is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face blowback for speaking out against a weakening of funding and federal support for climate, environmental and health science.

Continue reading...