Trump’s tariffs could hit UK medicine supply, Wes Streeting warns

US tariffs could adversely affect the supply of medicines to the UK, the health secretary has said.Donald Trump announced a wide range of “reciprocal” tariffs on goods imported into the US, including a 10% levy on the UK as well as 20% on the EU, 34% on China and 46% on Vietnam.It triggered a rout on stock markets worldwide, with plunges not seen since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, wiping out trillions of dollars in value.Wes Streeting told Sky News that the chaos caused by the fears of a global trade war could disrupt supplies of medicine.“As ever in terms of medicines, there’s a number of factors at play,” he said

Health workers sent door to door in deprived areas to detect illnesses

The NHS is attempting to ease the pressure on GPs and A&E by sending a new type of health worker door to door in deprived areas to help detect illnesses before people need urgent care.Community health and wellbeing workers (CHWW) are already deployed in 12 areas of England, with 13 others to follow, in an attempt to improve poor and vulnerable people’s access to care.Each worker is responsible for 120-150 households, usually on a council estate, which they visit once a month to help residents with money, isolation and housing problems, as well as their health.Wes Streeting, the heath secretary, is examining the scheme as he pulls together ideas to help “fix” the NHS that may be included in the forthcoming 10-year health plan.GPs and other advocates of deploying community health and wellbeing workers believe they can help Streeting achieve two of the “three big shifts” in healthcare he has promised: moving care from hospitals into the community and making the NHS a prevention rather than treatment service

Hospitals in England could shed 100,000 jobs in response to cost-cutting orders

Hospitals in England could axe more than 100,000 jobs as a result of the huge reorganisation and brutal cost-cutting ordered by Wes Streeting and the NHS’s new boss.The scale of looming job losses is so large that NHS leaders have urged the Treasury to cover the costs involved, which they say could top £2bn, because they do not have the money.Sir Jim Mackey, NHS England’s new chief executive, has told the 215 trusts that provide health care across England to cut the costs of their corporate functions – such as HR, finance and communications – by 50% by the end of the year.But the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, said some trusts believe complying with that edict could force them to shed anywhere between 3% and 11% of their entire workforce.If replicated across the 215 trusts, that could lead to job losses ranging from 41,100 to 150,700, given they employ 1

UK Aids Memorial Quilt to go on display at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall

A giant quilt made to remember people who died of Aids in Britain is to be publicly displayed later this year at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London.The UK Aids Memorial Quilt was created in the 1980s at the height of the epidemic to raise awareness of the disease and humanise the people who died from it. By the end of 2011, 20,335 people diagnosed with HIV had died in the UK.The project took its inspiration from the US Aids Quilt, which was initiated in 1987 by the American human rights activist, author and lecturer Cleve Jones. The Scottish activist Alistair Hume met Jones in San Francisco, saw the US quilt and decided to start a UK chapter, from his base in Edinburgh

Woman becomes first UK womb transplant recipient to give birth

Surgeons are hailing an “astonishing” medical breakthrough as a woman became the first in the UK to give birth after a womb transplant.Grace Davidson, 36, who was a teenager when diagnosed with a rare condition that meant she did not have a uterus, said she and her husband, Angus, 37, had been given “the greatest gift we could ever have asked for”.They named their five-week-old girl Amy Isabel – after Grace’s sister, Amy Purdie, who donated her own womb during an eight-hour operation in 2023, and Isabel Quiroga, a surgeon who helped perfect the transplant technique.Davidson said she felt shocked when she first held her daughter, who was born by planned NHS caesarean section on 27 February at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital in London. She said: “It was just hard to believe she was real