Great Ormond Street hospital cleaners win racial discrimination appeal

Black cleaners at Great Ormond Street hospital were subjected to “indirect race discrimination” by the wait for NHS pay terms and conditions after their services were brought in-house, a tribunal has found.A case against the London children’s hospital brought by 80 cleaners – the majority of whom are from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds – was dismissed by an employment tribunal in 2024.But in a judgment handed down this week in a four-year legal battle, the employment appeal tribunal (EAT) upheld their appeal against the original decision, accepting their claim that they had suffered discrimination in not getting NHS “Agenda for Change” (AfC) pay rates “immediately or shortly thereafter” when their contracts were transferred in 2021.It is understood all staff have now been offered NHS AfC terms. If the hospital does not appeal further, the case is expected to move to discussions over financial remedy

ADHD waiting lists ‘clogged by patients returning from private care to NHS’

Waiting lists for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in England are being clogged by patients returning to NHS care after difficulties with private assessments, a trust has warned.The major NHS trust said people referred by GPs to private clinics using health service funding were increasingly asking to be transferred back after care stalled.These include cases where private clinics are able to diagnose ADHD but their assessments do not always comply with guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or where providers lack staff with the appropriate qualifications to support continued prescribing.The consequences for patients can be severe. Some are facing prescription costs of more than £200 a month after GPs said they could no longer work with private clinics under shared care agreements

Rural and coastal areas of England to get more cancer doctors

Hospitals in rural and coastal parts of England will get more cancer doctors to help tackle stark inequalities that mean people in some areas are far more likely to die from the disease.The plan is part of a government drive to end the “patchy” nature of NHS cancer care, which is characterised by wide postcode lotteries in access to diagnostic tests and treatment.“For too long your chances of seeing a doctor and catching cancer early have depended on where you live,” said Wes Streeting, the health secretary.“That’s not fair and has to stop. Whether you live in a coastal town or a rural village, you deserve the same shot at survival and quality of life as everyone else

‘Manosphere’ influencers pushing testosterone tests are convincing healthy young men there is something wrong with them, study finds

“If you’re not waking up in the morning with a boner, there’s a large possibility that you have low testosterone levels,” an influencer on TikTok with more than 100,000 followers warns his viewers.Despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most young men, this group is being aggressively targeted online by influencers and wellness companies promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man”, a study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine has found.Researchers analysed 46 high-impact posts about low testosterone and testing made by TikTok and Instagram accounts with a combined following of more than 6.8 million, to examine how masculinity and men’s health are being depicted and monetised online.The lead author of the study, Emma Grundtvig Gram, a public health researcher at the University of Copenhagen, said influencers promoting routine testosterone screening often framed normal variations in energy, mood, libido or ageing “as signs of pathology”

John Knight obituary

Disabled people might still be waiting for all UK trains to be accessible were it not for the success of a high-profile campaign led by John Knight, who has died of sepsis aged 67, after himself overcoming profound disabilities from birth and becoming a leading figure in the charity and public sectors.Knight was responsible for policy and campaigns at the disability charity Leonard Cheshire during passage of the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, which was to set a deadline for railway carriages to be accessible. Train companies were pressing for a date of 2035, to maximise the life of inaccessible rolling stock, but the campaign persuaded the House of Lords to back an amendment to the legislation with a time limit of 2020. The change was then accepted by the Labour government.At the climax of the All Aboard campaign, Knight arranged for a horse-drawn hearse to deliver to MPs and peers thousands of postcards on which disabled people had written what age they would need to live to in order to benefit from a 2035 deadline

Assisted dying bill backers say it is ‘near impossible’ it will pass House of Lords

MPs and peers who backed the assisted dying bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords in time because of procedural obstacles used by opponents.Supporters of the bill, including its sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, have been in intense discussions with the government to find ways to move it to a vote in the Lords. With progress so slow, experts and MPs believe it is unlikely the legislation will even be put to a vote before the end of the session in May, after which it will automatically fall.MPs told the Guardian they were in “blind fury” about the apparent inevitability of the billing falling in the Lords despite passing the Commons. “It is our system at its absolute most dysfunctional,” one MP said