NHS staff face ‘national emergency’ as patient violence hits 285 incidents a day

Nurses, doctors and paramedics are reporting tens of thousands of violent and sexual assaults by patients every year, amid warnings that the abuse of NHS staff has become a national crisis.More than 295,000 incidents of physical violence and aggression by patients against staff were recorded by 212 NHS trusts in England between 2022 and 2025, freedom of information requests by the Guardian found.Healthcare unions warned of a spike in assaults on staff over Christmas and the New Year. A man attacked and injured six staff and patients with a crowbar in Newton community hospital in Merseyside last week. He has been arrested and detained under the Mental Health Act, according to Merseyside police

Labour should ‘buy the supply’ of housing from landlords | Letters

My heart obviously breaks for distressed buy-to-let landlords (Are UK buy-to-let landlords dying out – and should we care?, 5 January) but, if some landlords are feeling the pinch, a policy I have long pestered the government about is, by chance, tailor-made to help them. We need to replenish our decimated social housing stock, and part of the answer is what I call “buy the supply”.For years, I have called for funding to help councils increase the number of homes they can buy into their housing supply. Whether that is buying back right to buy homes, or snapping up suitable houses that are put on the market, this can achieve immediate, construction-risk-free social homes near existing schools, parks and health services.We need as many new council homes as possible, and we know we cannot rely solely on the existing sluggish model of finding land and building new apartments, most of which are too small for families

Could egg defect breakthrough help stop the ‘horrible IVF rollercoaster’?

It is a rollercoaster of emotional extremes that will be familiar to many who have gone through IVF treatment: hope and joy turns to despair and back again. This is especially true for women over 35, the age when IVF success rates decline steeply and for whom the only real way to improve the odds is to keep trying.While there has been huge progress in IVF in the past decades, including the advent of genetic testing, egg freezing and techniques to overcome male infertility, the primary cause of age-related female infertility – egg quality – has not been directly addressed.Now, groundbreaking research presented at the Fertility 2026 in Edinburgh this week, suggests progress is on the horizon. Scientists from a leading lab in Germany say they have been able to reverse a common age-related defect in eggs in an advance that they predict could be transformative

Dame Sarah Anderson obituary

When King Charles made a personal visit to Sarah Anderson to confer her damehood two days before her death from cancer at the age of 69, she characteristically did not let slip the opportunity to ask him to help The Listening Place, the suicide prevention charity she founded a decade ago in the belief that sustained, in-person support was vital to save many people in crisis.Anderson had been a Samaritans volunteer in central London for 37 years, but parted company with the charity in 2015 over its then policy, since partially reversed, of no longer offering meetings with an identified counsellor. With the support of a group of other disaffected volunteers including her husband, Terrence Collis, whom she had met at Samaritans, she set up The Listening Place the following year to provide free, face-to-face support for people with suicidal thoughts. Today, the charity offers more than 4,000 appointments a month across four bases in London and has to date received more than 40,000 referrals, the great majority via the NHS.The drive that Anderson showed in developing her charity was equally evident in other parts of her life

Alzheimer’s therapies should target a particular gene, researchers say

New therapies for Alzheimer’s disease should target a particular gene linked to the condition, according to researchers who said most cases would never arise if its harmful effects were neutralised.The call to action follows the arrival of the first wave of drugs that aim to treat Alzheimer’s patients by removing toxic proteins from the brain. While the drugs slow the disease down, the benefits are minor, and they have been rejected for widespread use by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).In searching for alternative therapies, scientists at UCL say drug developers should focus on two risk-raising variants of a gene named Apoe. Therapies designed to block the variants’ impact have “vast potential” for preventing the disease, they claim

Thousands of offenders in England to get health support at probation meetings

About 4,000 offenders in England will get targeted healthcare sessions during their probation appointments as part of a new pilot scheme.Offenders are far more likely to have poor physical or mental health or addiction issues, which increases the likelihood of reoffending.A recent report by the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, found that half of offenders on probation smoked, many had drug or alcohol addiction issues and a majority had poor mental health. They were also less likely to receive screening for prostate, breast, lung or cervical cancers.Many offenders do not receive timely care because they are not registered with a GP, meaning often they seek help for any physical or mental health problems only when their symptoms have become acute, turning to A&E