With more people dying each year and many spending their final days in institutions, researchers argue that wider access to palliative care could offer a more humane and cost-effective alternative, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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The so-called ‘specialist’ care units that swallow up vital NHS funds
A new report highlights how patients are being moved ‘out of area’ to private-sector units at massive cost and with minimal evidence of improvement to health. RUTH HUNT reports
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
DR HANA SAADA asks why a war crime against innocent children on this scale does not dominate the world’s coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran
From the colonial oil plunder of 1909 to the current threat of a regional inferno: Western interference in Iran forms a chain of coups, puppets, and cynical geopolitics centered on oil, says MARC VANDEPITTE
NORMA AUSTIN HART reports from a conference on on the rights of women prisoners in the Scottish criminal justice system
A REPORT from the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder (BIGSPD) highlights the problematic practice of moving patients out-of-area to so-called “specialist” personality disorder residential units in the private sector, with massive costs and no oversight, that could be better diverted to improve local NHS mental health services.
Far too many patients on mental health wards who have the contentious catch-all diagnosis of borderline personality disorder are still being moved hundreds of miles away into residential and sometimes locked placements in the private sector they are told are “specialist” personality disorder units.
Concern about this practice has been raised by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Rethink, among other organisations.
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