The kids are all right when they don’t drink | Letters

While teenagers will always want to get drunk, we as responsible adults should be doing everything in our power to prevent this (Teenagers will always get drunk – so why don’t we just serve them in pubs?, 10 September). We know that drinking as a teen alters brain structure, is damaging to the developing brain and is a predictor of lifelong issues with alcohol. Delaying alcohol consumption reduces these risks. Young adults are not as good at making safe decisions and alcohol further reduces this capacity, so they are more likely to be involved in life-changing injuries to themselves or others or death.Therefore drinking as a young adult can have significant long-term costs to individuals and the wider community – for example, the strain on the NHS from binge drinking and the societal and economic cost of alcohol-use disorder

Enforce zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment of doctors | Letter

Your report on the sexual harassment faced by doctors around the world is disturbing, yet sadly it is a reality for many working in the NHS (Almost half of doctors sexually harassed by patients, research finds, 9 September). Perhaps even more disturbing is the notion that this kind of abuse is something that doctors feel they should just put up with.Becoming desensitised to sexual harassment may mean incidents are not reported and that the doctor is not seeking appropriate support. Experiencing or witnessing sexual harassment by a patient can have a lasting and profound impact on mental health, and this can be damaging for the individual as well as for patient care. It can also result in doctors needing to take time off or leaving the healthcare profession altogether

Call for abolition of UK benefit cap as latest figures released

Charities have called on the government to abolish the benefit cap after the latest official figures showed 123,000 households containing an estimated 302,000 children were subject to it, trapping them in poor housing and extreme poverty.Campaigners said increasing numbers of households were being made homeless and were suffering hardship as a result of the benefit cap, with single parents, female survivors of domestic abuse and children disproportionately affected.There was a 61% increase in the number of capped households in the three months to May, the statistics show – a dramatic rise attributed to the previous government’s decision not to uprate the benefit cap in line with inflation.“If the government is serious about tackling child poverty, it must take immediate action. The benefit cap must be scrapped so families can move on from damaging temporary accommodation into a settled home,” said Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter

Junior doctors bring dispute to end by voting to accept Streeting’s pay offer

Junior doctors in England have voted to accept the government’s pay offer, bringing to an end one of the longest and bitterest disputes in recent NHS history.Just under two-thirds (66%) of the 45,830 junior doctors who voted backed the deal, which will see them receiving an average salary increase of 22.3% over two years.It ends 18 months of strikes during which junior doctors stopped work on 44 days – sometimes for five days at a time – causing huge disruption to the NHS.The 22

Lord Darzi’s report into the NHS is just the start | Letters

When Tony Blair was elected in 1997, it was on a platform of “saving the NHS”. He assured us that it must change or die. Then followed Labour’s agenda for change, bringing in private healthcare to take some of the burden from a struggling NHS, which was only struggling because of repeated years of underfunding.The Darzi report clearly shows that the NHS is still struggling due to underfunding from successive governments, yet Keir Starmer’s response is to fling that straight back at the NHS and blame it, now with the line “reform or die” (Darzi review says the NHS is in a critical condition but sets out a treatment plan, 11 September). It didn’t need “change” then, it doesn’t need “reform” now

Fentanyl was killing their friends – and no one was talking about it. So these teens stepped up

As fake pills send teen overdose deaths skyrocketing, these high schoolers are filling an information void with films and peer-to-peer educationEli Myers was only 15 when his close friend and classmate Chloe Kreutzer died from taking a counterfeit Percocet pill filled with fentanyl.Initially, he said, the response from officials at his Los Angeles high school was stony silence. Even years later, the information he and his classmates got about the risks of fentanyl poisoning amounted to little more than a droning lecture in health class, he said.The same thing happened at Kyle Santoro’s northern California high school, when a student was found overdosing in a bathroom and was revived by the principal with Narcan.“Our school never talked about it,” said Santoro, who said the student had just disappeared from campus and most students never even knew what happened