Displaying items by tag: Department of Health

Health campaigners accused Boris Johnson of ‘playing politics’ with children's health after the department of health said it plans to defer the bans on multi-buy deals for junk food and pre-watershed TV advertising for a year. Officials will assess the impact on household finances as families struggle with the increasing cost of living. Curbs on junk food placement in stores will still go ahead in October. Public health minister Maggie Throup insisted the Government remains committed to tackling the issue of childhood obesity. Prof Graham MacGregor, a cardiologist who is chairman of Action on Sugar, said the delays contradicted the ‘levelling up’ agenda.

Some medical students need to work multiple part-time jobs to afford to complete their degrees. Final year students have stopped training because they don't have enough money to survive.

For that year, they get a bursary to live on (maximum £6,458). It is not enough - especially for those from low-income backgrounds. They are campaigning for better NHS bursaries. Penny Sucharitkul hopes to be a vascular surgeon, but the money does not even cover her rent. She is from a single-parent family, and relying on Universal Credit after her father lost his job during the pandemic. On top of studying full-time, she works as a martial arts instructor and a clinical research assistant. She says working-class students are treated unfairly. ‘We're getting up at 6 am, training all day, then going to work again. It’s incredibly taxing on our mental health. We're burning people out before they've even started in the NHS.’

A County Antrim GP practice will only be able to open a branch clinic two half days a week because of a Department of Health (DoH) funding cut. The practice can no longer cover the costs of a full-time service which opened in 2017 to take 1,400 new patients. DoH said additional payments between 2017 and 2021 were temporary, ‘to support the practice for a period of three years to enable them to manage the registration and complete an initial clinical review of these additional patients.’ Dr John McSparran, from the practice, disagrees vehemently. ‘We were never under the impression it was for three years, otherwise we would never have entered the agreement in the first place. We've tried to address this, continuing the service at our own cost. But financially the practice is unviable and can no longer cover the costs of a full-time service.’