For a substantial amount of time now, Buckinghamshire has received less funding per capita than most of the country for our hospitals. This ‘cash-starving’ or 'squeeze' contributed to downgrades at Amersham and Wycombe hospitals and our Trust has recently been in 'special measures'. Since the downgrades at Wycombe hospital, many people have suffered and neighbouring hospitals have been overwhelmed. Staff, patients and their loved ones deserve better.

The Walk In Centre is easily accessible and an excellent service used by more than 27,000 people last year. Local people are very concerned at the prospect of losing this local facility and feel the District Hospital in South Shields as an alternative is out of the way. Waiting 2 weeks to see a GP is not an option for worried parents with poorly kids, the elderly, and vulnerable patients. The Walk In Centre is a prime example of Right Treatment, Right Time, Right Place.

Whether we farm animals for food, use them for recreation, or keep them as pets, we need to make sure they are properly looked after. This requires more than simply protecting them from cruelty. We need to meet their needs for food, water and living space, protect them from disease, and create a healthy and stress-free living environment for them. When we slaughter animals for food, we need to ensure that, as far as possible, they have calm, painless deaths.

Biomedical Scientists working in the Pathology Department at Northampton General Hospital have been involved in a bitter year long dispute over changes to their shift patterns and payments. This involved plans to sack and re-engage them resulting in payments for out-of-hours being slashed by 80% and a doubling of night time shifts. Consequently Unite members voted to take industrial action, short of strike, at 00:01 on Thursday 26th June. However, when the 78 Biomedical Scientists turned up for work at 9am they were barred from entering the workplace unless they were prepared to sign that they would not participate in industrial action. They have been 'locked out' since and Unite has accused the hospital Management of a disgraceful abuse of power in retaliation for the laboratory staff exercising their legal right to take industrial action. Currently the service is being provided by a handful of poorly trained locums and non-laboratory based managers with many tests being out sourced to other laboratories. The cost of this may reach up to £1 million a year and the staff believe the service is no longer safe. Unite is calling on the Trust to abandon it's bully-boy tactics and to sit down with ACAS to settle the dispute.

The effect of GM crops is very difficult to evaluate as trials can cause unknown effects that may have long term effects. The use of genetically modified crops that include "built in" pesticides can have detrimental effects on the nervous system of Bees who are already in decline. The full effects of GM crops are not known and the British Farming system is not a suitable or safe environment for trials.

Parents want the best for their children's health, and we don't want them addicted to salt which can lead to health issues. There is plenty of salt that is harder to remove from their diets, but not coating their fries in salt is a simple action that we can take in reducing their salt intake.

Lets get nurses and other hardworking grassroots NHS staff the pay rise they deserve. MPs have had a 10% pay rise in the last year, cost of living is said to have gone up by 13% in the past year or so, yet nurses have been refused a 1% pay rise. Some hardworking nurses are having to visit food banks to get by, is this right ?

Cannabis first became illegal in the UK, and most of the rest of the world, on 28th September 1928 when the 1925 Dangerous Drugs Act came into force. There were no British domestic reasons, no lobbying for or against prohibition, and no Parliamentary debates. All scientific evidence shows the healing benefits for pain due to a multitude of ailments, and NO detrimental affects on mind or health at all. At a time when Britain is facing brutal austerity measure, The Institute For Social And Economic Research recently estimated that a regulated market could reduce the government deficit by up to £1.25bn, whilst producing roughly £400m in "net benefit" for the country. I have multiple sclerolis and most if not all the 'legal' pain relief I have been prescribed, take the edge off the pains but at the same time doing damage to my internal organs. Cannabis works and causes no damage at all. All humans have been naturally designed to work alongside cannabis. Doctors take the oath to provide help and healing, yet they can not offer cannabis in its natural form and they themselves feel helpless, as they are well aware of the therapeutic benefits of cannabis yet held back due to the law falsely claiming that it's dangerous without showing any scientific proof at all

This concerns every person living in Britain. What happened to Mr Hilton can happen to anyone in Britain, whether we’re aware of it or not. The following took place. Mr Hilton of Meadoway, Church in East Lancashire felt very vulnerable and grew increasingly upset when he was threatened with eviction from the home in which he’d been living for 30 years. He responded by threatening to blow up his home. The reason for the eviction was that Mr Hilton developed rent arrears as a result of what PM David Cameron euphemistically and callously calls the withdrawal of the spare room subsidy, and what I see as an instrument of a feudal aristocracy, the so-called bedroom tax. We all tend to assume that when someone else is threatened with eviction, the person could make this ‘go away’ if only they would act. Because we have no choice but to believe that if it happened to us, we would make it go away. Because we, we would act. That is how threatening the idea of an eviction is to most of us. Losing our home… In reality, however, there is often very little a person can do against an eviction for arrears if the person has no money. In cases of rent arrears caused by the so-called bedroom tax, it is safe to assume that if the person was unable to do anything about the bedroom tax, he or she is equally unable to do anything about the eviction. Effectively, Mr Hilton was being threatened with homelessness after having lived in his home for 30 years. I don’t know Mr Hilton and he may have been seriously mentally ill. If he was merely terribly stressed, then chances are that he did not stick his head in the sand, but simply felt there was nothing he could do and was convinced that his housing association could not do anything for him either. I think that he threatened to blow up his home because he could not accept the idea that there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop the eviction. He did not blow up anything at all, and no one got hurt. He just yelled. He was arrested because he had made many people worried which can be seen as a disturbance. He has been in custody since the beginning of June 2014. The plea hearing is set for 22 August 2014 and his trial hearing is scheduled for 12 November 2014. A little earlier, namely in May 2014, David Garbett of Sunderland took similarly drastic steps when he chained himself and his wheelchair to the railings of Southwick JobCentre. In his case, his Employment Support Allowance had stopped which meant that he became unable to buy food and pay bills. After he chained himself to the JobCentre, Mr Garbett’s claim was settled, and his payments were backdated. Mr Garbett was not in danger of losing his home, but he too was desperate so he did something desperate. When austerity has already been part of your daily life for years, there is no room for more austerity. It is believed that Mr Hilton was eligible for exemption from this wretched bedroom tax, but apparently did not know how to obtain this exemption. It is also believed that Mr Hilton had been in bad mental health for some time. So here we have two men who apparently both had health problems. One was losing his home and spoke desperte words that others felt threatened by, but did not carry out his threats. The other one was fed up with having to go to the food bank and being unable to pay his bills and did not threaten but took desperate action. One is now in detention and has lost his home. The other one’s claims were reinstated and backdated. Mr Hilton – the man in detention – is a victim, not a criminal. He deserves leniency.

Many problems in social care in and around private sector centre around the failures of organisations to recruit and train staff appropriately. The dementia strategy is only one element of ensuring care is appropriate in both hospital and community settings, and that patients are treated with respect and the dignity they deserve. Not withstanding the fact that most of these services are purchased on behalf of either NHS scotland and local authorities and the majority of staff working in the care industry are often: (1) women (2) have unpaid caring commitments such as children or elderly relatives themselves (c) in poverty despite being in work (4) part time. Surely the large city councils in Scotland despite the squeeze on the public purse and NHS when commissioning should ensure that as part of the arms length approach to nursing and social care that staff are paid a living wage. This industry has large recruitment issues such as high turnover, and if companies paid the living wage it perhaps would go some way to address this and ensure adequate staffing with the appropriate knowledge and skills are employed. Most companies in the private sector do not recognise that the staff that are employed on basic salary despite giving up weekends and working unsocial hours with the only recognition of this fact being on 8 public holidays a year where staff are paid an unsocial hrs bonus and also a high number are on zero contracts.

The health risks of coal ash are well known and widely documented; coal ash containing arsenic, mercury, lead, and many more heavy metals, many of which are toxic. These toxic constituents of the coal ash extracted will pollute the air, the land and our drinking water; this poses acute risks of cancer and neurological damage, along with damage to the heart, lung disease, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in children (PSR, 2009; 2010; 2014*).   The planning application 2013/0223 can be seen here: http://applications.barnsley.gov.uk/PlanningExplorer/Generic/StdDetails.aspx?PT=Planning%20Applications%20On-Line&TYPE=PL/PlanningPK.xml&PARAM0=681860&XSLT=/PlanningExplorer/SiteFiles/Skins/Barnsley/xslt/PL/PLDetails.xslt&FT=Planning%20Application%20Details&PUBLIC=Y&XMLSIDE=/PlanningExplorer/SiteFiles/Skins/Barnsley/Menus/PL.xml&DAURI=PLANNING We are alarmed that the coucil only wrote to a small number of houses in out village when the serious risk of lethal air pollution will effect every resident in Elsecar, Hoyland and their neighbouring areas. The 40, 000 cubic meters of toxic coal ash this application hopes to extract from a residential area would contaminate the air that we breath; many of the local residents already suffer respiratory issues such as asthma, bronchiectasis, COPD and lung cancers, along with many of the other aforementioned health problems, due to previous coal mining in this area. The proposed excration of coal ash would exacerbate existing health problems due to previous coal mining, and cause new lethal health problems for the residents of the village - the toxic dust would also coat our buildings, plants, allotments, outbuildings, and vehicles.   The detrimental effects that the proposed works will have on our air quality and also our quality of life are not acceptable. The planning application outlines the use of 15 - 20 x 20 tonne lorries transporting coal ash for a 6 - 12 month period; along with the toxic air pollution, is the issue of noise from these works, which will be in very close proximity to our properties, causing daily disruption to the residents; the only routes available to access the proposed sites are all small roads in a populated residential area which is home to people and children of all ages using residential housing, primary schools, churches, doctors surgeries, heritage facilities, leisure facilities and access to local transport.    Furthermore, these proposed works also pose serious risks to our properties. We have detailed structural and environmental surveys from the purchase of our properties which highlight the fragility of the local land and the neighbouring areas from previous mining. Many buildings in the village, and others in the surrounding areas, have been affected by subsidence in the past as a result of previous mining, with many local properties having encountered structural damage as a result.  We feel the proposed extraction of 40, 000cubic meters of coal ash poses serious short and long terms risks to the foundations of local and historic buildings on land which has been mined previously, contains air shafts and has experienced previous subsidence - to the extent that some buildings had to have remedial works carried out, and some were demolished.  We are deeply concerned that this proposal - which will affect the entire village - has not been communicated to all the residents it will affect. Only a small number of residents received a short notification letter from the Development Service department at Barnsley Council, leaving the majority of the village neighbouring unaware of the dangerous works being proposed. Many residents are alarmed by the seemingly covert nature of the handling of this application. Please help us to reject of this application, as we are deeply concerned about the dangers it poses to the health of the local residents, and the risks to the foundations and structure of our properties and local buildings. Thank you for taking the time to look at our petition, we hope you will support us with your signature and by sharing this through social media.

We believe that elderly and disabled people in our community deserve the best possible level of homecare to help them live independently and with dignity. In order to make this happen homecare workers need to be treated fairly and decently so they can do their jobs to the best of their ability. UNISON are therefore calling for this through by asking Bolton Council to adopt our ethical care charter. Across the country too many people who need care and too many care workers are not treated with the dignity they deserve. A number of other councils such as Islington and Reading have already done the right thing and adopted UNISON’s Ethical Care Charter. Please add your name and call ask that Bolton Council take responsibility for ensuring better care for our elderly and disabled people and for better treatment of our homecare workers. We are all going to need care at some point in our lifetimes, it is only right that the people who need it and the workers who provide it are treated with dignity and fairness. For updates visit http://www.unisonbolton.org/ & follow https://twitter.com/UNISON_Bolton