NHS restructure is greatest danger to Streeting’s effort to revive service

In the Great Hall at the University of East London last Wednesday, the perennially upbeat Wes Streeting was exuding even greater positivity than usual. After years of neglect under the Conservatives, he said, the NHS was starting to revive thanks to Labour’s medicine.In a bravura performance in front of an audience of health service bosses, policy experts and student nurses in their blue and green uniforms, Streeting reeled off a long list of improvements in his 20-month tenure as health secretary.The NHS backlog: down by 374,000 since Labour took over in July 2024. A&E waiting times: the best last winter for four years

NHS to miss targets for cutting A&E wait times and performance in England

The NHS is set to miss key targets to shorten waiting times for help at A&E, cancer care and planned hospital treatment, leaving millions of patients facing persistently long delays.The health service in England will not deliver a series of milestone improvements in its performance that ministers demanded it achieve by the time the fiscal year ends on Tuesday, a Guardian analysis of the NHS’s most recent data has found.The lack of progress raises questions about pledges made last week by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to get key waiting times back on track by the end of the parliament in 2029.The findings will concern Keir Starmer, the prime minister, given Labour’s commitment to “get the NHS back on its feet” and the public’s strong desire to see an end to the routinely long waits for care that crept in from 2015.The gloomy picture on waiting times also comes despite the NHS handing hospitals an extra £120m in recent weeks to fund a pre-deadline “elective sprint” – of extra appointments and more operations – intended to bolster its chances of delivering the necessary improvements by 31 March

Table tennis can help manage Parkinson’s | Brief letters

Regarding your article (A moment that changed me: I thought my Parkinson’s was the end of my life, but dancing changed everything, 25 March), people with Parkinson’s might like to take up table tennis. I set up a Parkinson’s table tennis project in Newcastle in 2025 and we have evidence showing improvements in coordination, footwork, social skills and speech. One member who had to hold on to the table can now play freehand without falling.Philip CheungNewcastle upon Tyne How can you have a list of the best songs about the moon (You saw me standin’ alone: songs about the moon – ranked!, 26 March) without including The Waterboys’ great The Whole of the Moon? Chris EvansEarby, Lancashire Inconceivable that your best songs about our beloved lunar sphere failed to mention the B-52s’ seminal There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon). It couldn’t be much clearer guys – it is mentioned twice

‘Definitely dodgy’: how to spot a fake vape

You buy a vape from a shop on the high street. Nothing looks unusual but after charging the unit and using it for a few days, you notice it is getting hotter and hotter.The vape is a fake and one of the thousands on sale illegally in shops around the UK. By not installing a simple circuit to prevent overheating, the manufacturers have saved a couple of pence but risk it catching fire.About 5m illegal devices have been seized over the last three years by councils, according to figures collated by the legitimate vape industry

The great care home cash grab: how private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs

When did care homes come to be seen as recession-proof investments? And who pays the price?On a spring morning in 1987, a 30-year-old man named Robert Kilgour pulled up beside a row of foamy cherry trees in the town of Kirkcaldy, on Scotland’s east coast, to visit an old hotel. The building was four storeys of blackened Victorian sandstone. Kilgour was a big man, a voluble Scot with a knack for storytelling. He already owned a hotel in Edinburgh but wanted to branch into property development and was planning to turn this old place, Station Court, into apartments. A few months after he completed the purchase, however, the Scottish government scrapped a grant for developers that he had been counting on

Conversations about infertility are hard, but essential | Letters

Perhaps one of the reasons that conversations about infertility are so difficult is that people are often encountering the experience for the first time without a shared language (Infertility: at a time when we need the right words, some are unable to find them, 21 March). In many ways, what people need is not just support, but a vocabulary for what they are going through. When someone loses a loved one, we have a go-to phrase: “I’m so sorry for your loss”. It’s not enough, but it’s something. With infertility, we don’t even have that