‘We’d be stuck’: alarm as UK’s last braille typewriter repairer ponders retirement

Alan Thorpe runs his fingers over the braille note attached to the latest repair job to arrive at his doorstep in Sheffield. Reading from the tactile note, he says: “The paper won’t wind in and the keys are jammed. Good luck.”Thorpe, 60, is the only certified repairer in the UK of Perkins braille typewriters, the world’s most widely used braille machines. Despite advances in digital technology, these 6kg analogue machines are still a vital communication tool for blind users and are especially crucial for teaching blind children to read and write

Seven in 10 GPs in UK suffer from compassion fatigue, survey finds

Seven in 10 GPs suffer from compassion fatigue and struggle to empathise with patients because they are worn out from caring for them, a survey has found.Family doctors say they are so emotionally and physically exhausted from hearing about patients’ problems and circumstances that it is compromising the quality of care they provide.A poll of 1,855 doctors across the UK found that 71% of GPs and 62% of medics overall have experienced compassion fatigue, which undermines the doctor-patient relationship.“Compassion fatigue is effectively a hidden, secondary trauma with symptoms that can ultimately make it extraordinarily difficult for family doctors to treat their patients,” said Dr John Holden, the chief medical officer at the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland (MDDUS), which undertook the survey.GPs are “particularly vulnerable” to the syndrome because of their “prolonged exposure to patients’ suffering and trauma”, and their heavy workloads because the NHS is overloaded, he said

Urgent referrals of children in mental health crisis in England rise 13% in year

The number of children referred to emergency mental healthcare in England has risen by 10% in a year, with lengthy waiting lists for regular NHS care pushing more to crisis point.There were 34,793 emergency, very urgent or urgent referrals to child and adolescent mental health services crisis teams between April and October 2024, analysis of official data by the mental health charity YoungMinds found. That compared with 31,749 in the same six-month period in 2023.Many of the children requiring emergency care – some of them suicidal or seriously ill as a result of eating disorders – have been stuck on NHS waiting lists for months or, in the worst cases, several years.The chief executive of YoungMinds, Laura Bunt, said the figures were concerning and showed that thousands of children urgently required help earlier to prevent them from becoming seriously unwell

Georgina Towers obituary

My wife Georgina Towers, who has died aged 43 from a brain tumour, was an art psychotherapist and a “people person”; she was also renowned for her advocacy of human rights.She volunteered for Freedom from Torture, where she was humbled by its work with survivors; she felt inspired to raise funds for the charity and completed the Dublin marathon and various triathlon events. She was a keen wild swimmer and even completed the length of Wastwater in the Lake District a few months after her second brain surgery.Born in Dublin, Georgina was the daughter of Jill (nee Hollwey), a psychotherapist and author, and John Brierley, a chartered surveyor and author of guide books. The family moved to live in the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland in 1987

Prisons in England and Wales record rapid rise in drones delivering drugs

Prisons will need more money to combat the rapid rise in drones delivering drugs, the head of an influential Commons committee has said, as figures showed the number of aerial incursions predicted to have tripled in two years.A freedom of information request by the Guardian found there were 1,296 drone incidents at prisons in England and Wales in the 10 months to the end of October 2024, a tenfold increase since 2020.The Labour chair of the Commons justice committee, Andy Slaughter, said the figures should “set alarm bells ringing” about prison security.“We wouldn’t be having these increases in incidents if the Prison Service was on top of it. Clearly they are playing catch up,” he said

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