We need to build houses people can afford | Letters

Your report on homelessness among over‑55s reflects a crisis already hitting those of us just behind them (‘People are so judgmental’: the growing cohort of over-55s facing homelessness, 8 April). I am approaching 50 and living in my best friend’s spare room – not through mismanagement, but because the housing system has stopped producing homes people can actually afford.Yet we continue to build four‑bedroom detached houses on car‑dependent estates, far from services and transport. These developments do nothing for those facing rising rents, insecure tenancies and shrinking options.What we need is genuinely affordable social housing within existing towns and cities: accessible, energy‑efficient homes close to shops, healthcare, green space and public transport

Sussex baby deaths inquiry will fail to learn lessons after excluding families, Streeting warned

An inquiry into the preventable deaths of babies in Sussex will fail to learn the lessons as it “systematically” excluded dozens of families, Wes Streeting has been warned before a meeting with bereaved parents.The health secretary has ordered a review of nine infant deaths at the University Hospitals Sussex NHS foundation trust amid maternity scandals across England. However, families are calling on Streeting to expand the investigation to all those who died and might have survived with better care.To date, the families of more than 60 babies who died between 2019 and 2023 have expressed concerns about their care, although the true figure is expected to be higher.Dr Marija Pantelic, a public health expert whose baby Sasha died in the care of UH Sussex in January 2022, said the narrow scope and opt-in nature of the review was dangerous and potentially harmful as it would be based on the experiences of an “overwhelmingly white and British” group of parents

AI to predict how bowel cancer patients will respond to new NHS drug

A new AI-driven way of identifying how patients with advanced bowel cancer will respond to a drug that was recently introduced by the NHS has been announced.Researchers at London’s Institute of Cancer Research and the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin have developed the method with the goal of sparing potentially thousands of patients from being given drugs that would be ineffective in fighting their cancers.In the UK alone, nearly 10,000 cases of advanced bowel cancer are identified every year, with young adults seeing a particular rise in diagnoses. Bowel cancer has the second highest mortality rate of any cancer, behind only lung cancer, and while survival rates can be as high as 98% when caught early, the five-year survival rate for advanced bowel cancer can be as low as 10%.The study tracked 117 European bowel cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy and bevacizumab, a drug that was approved by the NHS in December

More than a fifth of UK’s ‘austerity children’ scarred by poverty, study says

More than a fifth of all “austerity generation” British children have been scarred by poverty for at least half their childhood, a direct legacy of the welfare benefit cuts imposed by Conservative governments in recent years, research reveals.The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years of life in hardship surged after ministers froze working age benefits levels and imposed policies such as the two-child limit, it found.Austerity policies, which drastically shrank annual welfare spending by tens of billions a year and took thousands of pounds a year out of low-income family budgets, effectively pitched hundreds of thousands more children into sustained poverty.The University of Oxford study said the austerity-era growth in children exposed to poverty for most of their formative years was a “significant social problem” that would cause long-term harms to their health, education and life chances.The study’s co-author, Selçuk Bedük, said the post-2013 austerity cuts to welfare increased both the numbers of children experiencing poverty and the time they spent in it

Private firms providing services to NHS made £1.6bn profit in two years, research finds

Private firms providing services to the NHS including healthcare and consultancy have made £1.6bn in profits over the last two years, research reveals.The findings – on the basis of contracts worth £12bn – have prompted claims of “scandalous” profiteering, concern that the health service is being “taken for a ride” and calls for ministers to impose a cap on maximum profit levels.The £1.6bn in profits made in 2023-24 and 2024-25 would have been enough to pay for 9,178 doctors or 19,428 nurses during that time, according to the Centre for Health and the Public Interest

‘I just want to feel like me again’: the women still waiting for breast reconstruction years after lockdown

At the height of Covid, hundreds of cancer patients had mastectomies without the reconstruction that would normally accompany them. They would eventually get the surgery, they were told – but for many that promise feels more meaningless by the dayEvery time she lifts her arms to get dressed or hang out her washing, Julie Ford gets a painful reminder of one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. At 7am one day in April 2021, she had gone into hospital, alone and wearing a mask, to have her right breast and lymph nodes removed in a bid to stop breast cancer from spreading. Later that day, still groggy from the anaesthetic, in pain and with surgical drains hanging from both sides of her chest, she had staggered to the door with the help of two nurses. She was eased into a friend’s car and driven home to fend for herself