In a life threatening emergency the Air Ambulance Service is your lifeline no matter where you live in the UK. If you live in a rural area it is often your ONLY lifeline because it is too far by road for you to be treated within the golden hour. See also the BBC program "An Hour To Save Your Life" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03xkwyb

There's an obesity crisis. Despite the premature deaths of millions in the UK from obesity-related illnesses, shoppers still can't make healthy choices - because foods are full of stealth sugars, which don't appear clearly on the labels.

We run the risk that young people in particular will be so protected from risk that they don't grow up having "tested the boundaries". Since 1985 the Marlborough Brandt Group, a small charity in Marlborough Wiltshire, has sent over 1000 young people from our secondary schools to live with families and work in our link community of Gunjur in The Gambia, West Africa alongside young Gambians. All of these young people have benefited from this experience in terms of their personal and professional development and their understanding of the world beyond their community. Health and safety now dictates that a) we spend large sums of our charitable money for insurance cover b) large amounts of time conducting a risk analysis, which is almost meaningless in a rural African context and c) we consider stopping the programme and thus depriving young people of an extraordinary life-changing experience. This is a national issue and must be debated or our young in UK will be deprived a proper, well-rounded education.

Under plans from NHS England, it is intended to close three quarters of UK's specialist brain cancer centres who provide targeted radiotherapy treatment. This goes against everything that the NHS is supposed to stand for, meaning that possibly many additional miles will be travelled to one of the remaining few centres left. This is a disaster for patients and families alike and lead to totally unnecessary loss of life. Doctors, patients and families alike are furious as NHS England is rejecting doctors advice and is condemning patients to invasive brain surgery or total brain radiotherapy, whilst not using available resources sensibly. That NHS supposed transparency is once again not in existence means that already hard pressed families and patients with this invidious disease are left far behind their European and USA counterparts. It is a total travesty if these closures go ahead with the NHS Board members obviously having no knowledge of how this affects the patients and families lives on a daily basis.

By making a 3rd yr specialist doctor a consultant, he will be putting medical clinicians under unreasonable duress to both perform above their skill level and be responsible for the care pathway of patients well in advance of their abilities. Calling a 3rd yr doctor a consultant is a hideous mis-representation and will most likely have nothing but negative effects on the staff and healthcare organisations who will be required to work with the new system.

I have polycystic kidney disease and it is vital I take blood pressure tablets. I cannot always afford them. My blood pressure gets dangerously high - twice I have ended up in hospital.

Patient Care in any Health Service is paramount. Any action which adversely affects this service - calls for public awareness to address the issue.

Kevin Donovan of Defend the NHS says the following: You may have read in the press or online (or more likely may not have heard) about the major health data collection exercise which the government has initiated. Under changes to legislation, your GP can now be required to upload personal and identifiable information from the medical record of every patient in England to central computer servers at the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Once this information leaves your GP practice, your doctor will no longer be in control of what data is passed on or to whom. And private companies will be able to buy your information for just £1 (ONE pound!). This information will include diagnoses, investigations, treatments and referrals as well as other things you may have shared with your doctor including your weight, alcohol consumption, smoking and family history. Each piece of information will made identifiable by uploading it along with your NHS number, date of birth, post code, gender and ethnicity. Health data has always been collected* but this time it’s different. NHS England – the body now in charge of commissioning primary care services across England – will manage and use the information extracted by the Health and Social Care Information Centre for a range of purposes, none of which are to do with your direct medical care. These ‘secondary uses’ include patient-level tracking and monitoring, audit, business planning and contract management. Why should we worry? It seems clear that one hidden purpose of this exercise is to lubricate the galloping ‘marketisation’ of our health service, for example to allow health insurance companies to make huge profits from cherry-picking low risk patients for health cover. Over time, and as in the USA, if we can’t afford a health insurance premium (which is very likely if we are poorer and/or have any condition which may be expensive to treat) we won’t get free access at the point of need to medical care. It’s a nightmare! GPs’ hands are tied. They have been told it’s an offence not to provide the data. But patients can choose not to do so. How? Read these articles. In paragraph 4 you can download an opt-out letter for you to complete and use (template opt out letters for patients to use). http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/your-practice/practice-topics/it/eight-weeks-to-inform-patients-their-data-is-going-to-be-harvested-gps-warned/20004562.article#.UlF8er5wbmR http://medconfidential.org/how-to-opt-out/ http://opendemocracy.net/ournhs/phil-booth/your-medical-data-on-sale-for-pound http://medconfidential.org/2013/nhs-9-who-gets-to-see-your-information/ We doubt that many people know what’s happening – especially older patients and/or those without Internet access – so please distribute this information widely to your contacts and urge them to take action NOW. It’s OUR NHS not the government’s to sell off to their friends in the City. Thanks

Men who have been given Abiraterone and have had the expectation of receiving Enzalutamide after Abiraterone failure, are now denied this potentially life saving treatment. They are now going to die!

It's important that patients in England can and rightly should expect to be treated with care, compassion and that every attempt is made to preserve their dignity at the end of their life. This is important not only for the patient themselves but also their families. The Liverpool care pathway is used in situations where modern medicine is unable to prevent a patient's deterioration and where they are expected to die within the next 48-72 hours. It ensures that symptoms which are entirely predictable and a natural part of dying are assiduously looked for and controlled to ease a person's suffering at the end of their life. The loss of the pathway will effectively remove medical ad nursing staff's ability to ease patients' suffering as they are dying and will lead to futile and extraordinary measures to prolong life where there is no chance of improvement or recovery. At a time when families should be able to calmly reflect and celebrate the lives of their loved one in peace, instead patient's final days and hours will be transformed into a frenzied circus of intravenous cannulae placement, nasoenteric feeding tubes, 6 hourly infusions of fluids and antibiotics and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Allow patients to die in peace and enable our hospital staff to facilitate this as they have been doing since the inception of the Liverpool pathway.

People dealing with long term hospitalized relatives have enough burdens without having to continually payout for car park fees and TV. There is no other option for people on limited incomes who do not have access to lap top computers or iPad type devices to view the terrestrial TV channels. The only option is to pay for the patient line packages as there are no Ariel sockets for portable's as they were removed during the imposition of the patient line system when it was installed, on a monopoly bases it seems.

Blood stocks need consistent new donors. Daily there are advertisements on TV, radio and papers. By making donors travel a long way blood stocks will be jeopardised. It must be expensive making all these long term employees redundant so how can this be cost efficient? Sometimes a service like this is not just about money. Unfortunately services in the rural areas are expensive. I do it for my mum who regularly receives blood transfusions. How will you feel if you or a relative needed blood and there was none of the correct type! There is no price tag on life!