Hospital failings led to woman’s death after weight loss surgery, coroner says

Failings at a hospital contributed to the death of a 55-year-old woman who suffered abdominal sepsis after weight loss surgery at the time of a junior doctors’ strike, a coroner has said.Susan Evans returned to Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, Hampshire, with stomach pains two days after undergoing elective gastric bypass surgery.She was sent home without being seen by a member of the specialist bariatric team or a senior doctor, though hospital policy says this should happen, and became seriously unwell.Evans returned to hospital and underwent two further operations but died a month after the original procedure.In a prevention of future deaths report, the coroner Sally Olsen said neither written nor informal policies had been followed and failures “contributed more than minimally” to Evans’s death

NHS error meant hundreds of parents did not know children’s sickle cell status

An error by the NHS led to hundreds of families with African-Caribbean heritage being left unaware of whether their babies may be carriers of certain genetic blood disorders, the Guardian has learned.More than 800 families in Derbyshire were not sent the results of a heel prick test given to babies after birth, meaning they did not know whether their child was a carrier of a trait for sickle cell disease or for an unusual haemoglobin gene.The Guardian understands that the failure was uncovered in March this year, having gone unnoticed for 12 years, after a parent contacted the NHS to ask why they had not received their child’s results. The query led to the discovery of a systemic failure affecting hundreds of families. The NHS began to contact the affected families four months later

Quitting smoking may be easier with a smartwatch app, researchers say

Smartwatches could be used to help people quit smoking, a study suggests.Researchers have developed pioneering motion sensor software that can detect the typical hand movements that occur when someone is holding a cigarette.When cigarette use is detected, an alert flashes up on the smartwatch screen. An app on the device delivers a vibration with a text message designed by smokers and former smokers, offering support to stop smoking.One message reads “Stopping smoking lets you breathe more easily … Quitting is good”, while others contain a tally of how many cigarettes were smoked and the total number of drags taken that day

Hospital admissions for lack of vitamins soaring in England, NHS figures show

The number of people admitted to hospital in England because of a lack of vitamins or minerals is soaring, according to analysis of NHS figures.In 2023-24 there were 191,927 admissions where the main reason was a lack of iron, up 11% on 2022-23. The figure is almost 10 times the 20,396 hospital admissions for lack of iron in 1998-99.There were also 2,630 admissions in 2023-24 where B vitamin deficiency (other than folate) was the main reason, up 15% on the previous year and more than triple the 833 in 1998-99, according to the NHS data.Vitamin B12 or folate deficiency anaemia resulted in 3,490 hospital admissions in 2023-24, similar to the previous year but up fourfold from 836 in 1998-99, analysis by the PA Media news agency found

How soaring fees for private care are deepening England’s dentistry crisis

The inability of millions of patients to access an NHS dentist is one of the longest-running injustices in the history of the health service. The misery and the harm it causes is profound and well documented. The scandal is not new.Going private is often the only alternative. If it means getting a checkup, a scale and polish, a filling, an extraction or if necessary a root canal, many will pay

UK patients unable to get dental care after ‘eye-watering’ rise in private fees

Private dentists are cashing in on the scarcity of NHS treatment by hiking their charges for fillings, checkups and extractions to “eye-watering” levels, research has found.Patients are paying as much as £775 for root canal work, £435 to have a tooth out and £325 for a white filling due to fees for common dental procedures soaring since 2022.Fees for many treatments have undergone inflation-busting rises in the last two years as more people have been forced to seek non-NHS care, with the average cost of a non-surgical extraction going up by 32%, a comparison of prices at private dental surgeries across the UK has found.Patient groups warned that some people with dental problems were missing out on care altogether because NHS help is so hard to access and private treatment has become so expensive.“For patients struggling to access NHS dental care, and for those who choose to go private, the dramatic rise in private dental costs places essential care out of reach for many,” said Rachel Power, the chief executive of the Patients Association