#healthcare in wales

[mysharona1987]

Frankie Boyle.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amelia Hansford at PinkNews:

An emergency order implemented by former health secretary Victoria Atkins, under the Tory government, banned private prescriptions for puberty blockers, which are already inaccessible through the NHS.

The medication, primarily used by teenagers under the age of 18, halts unwanted elements of physical puberty. The NHS has described it as physically reversible. Following the emergency order, the not-for-profit group TransActual, alongside the Good Law Project and an unnamed claimant, challenged the decision, arguing that it was implemented outside of the health secretary’s powers. However, the court has now decided that she acted in accordance with the law. Throwing out the case, justice Beverley Lang said: “In my view, it was rational for [Victoria Atkins] to decide that it was essential to adopt the emergency procedure to avoid serious danger to the health of children and young people who would otherwise be prescribed puberty blockers during that five-to-sixth month period.”

Atkins’ emergency order was implemented following the publication of the Cass Report, a review into the way healthcare is administered to transgender young people in England. The controversial review made upwards of 32 recommendations, intended to build upon a “holistic approach” to treatment, but was criticised for potentially making it harder to access puberty blockers. Justice Lang said the review’s findings supporting an emergency halt to the prescription of puberty blockers, with claims of the “very substantial risks and very narrow benefits associated with the use of puberty blockers” were made clear. While the report did not definitively say that puberty blockers are harmful, the judge said this was not the question that it was asked to address.

A shameful ruling by the UK’s high court to ban puberty blockers in England, Wales, and Scotland.

[starlightshadowsworld]

Staff from Al Shifa Hospital sent a message to Rishi Sunak, UK prime minister.

That they don't have much time.

To bomb a hospital is a violation of international law.

This is not justifiable in any sense.

And our government knows this, our government that wants to tear down every support for Palestine knows this.

We can't let this call go unheard.

[totallyhussein-blog]

undefined

Nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland started a nationwide strike on Thursday, in the largest action of its kind in NHS history. Staff continued to provide "life-preserving" and urgent care. Laura is one of those Nurses and she was on strike in the UK city of Liverpool.

The Royal College of Nursing said staff had been given no choice after Government ministers refused to reopen pay talks. RCN general secretary Pat Cullen has called on the Government to "do the decent thing" and resolve the dispute.

"We need to stand up for our health service, we need to find a way of addressing those over seven million people that are sitting on waiting lists, and how are we going to do that? By making sure we have got the nurses to look after our patients."

[westmeath]

it's just an interesting comparison between here and our closest neighbours in the UK where transphobia and fear mongering in the media is rampant but, besides the insane wait times, getting access to hormones seems pretty straightforward in comparison from what ive heard from UK friends, but getting a gender recognition cert there is an absolute fucking nightmare, when here you just send off a form basically. i can also actually get top surgery in the UK which im doing since im registered with the welsh gender service now AND i can get it done For Absolute Free in just a few months when you literally can't get it done in ireland at all, you have to go abroad (most often spain, poland or turkey), and the process of getting that paid for is a thing in and of itself...

[nando161mando]

New South Wales used to be a leader in harm reduction, but has embraced the failed war on drugs and ignored its deadly consequences in recent decades.

[adlamu]

i cannot stress enough how much i appreciate nhs wales (the healthcare system) because i don't think i could survive with having to pay up to £607.88 for two different but very much needed inhalers every six weeks.

like £607.88??? every time i need a new set of inhalers??

[wearepeace]

“When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.” ― Jess C. Scott

[wild-at-mind]

Just listened to the new episode of Tortoise’s Slow Newscast about Gender GP and it’s sooooo bad. Maybe I should have known better than to bother with it, but I’ve enjoyed their non-gender related stuff. I also know at least one person who uses Gender GP, and I separately have been hearing from an FTM support group I’m in that a lot of NHS trusts are no longer willing to do shared care with Gender GP while still doing it with other similar services. I had hoped maybe it would shed some light on why that might be, because even though trans healthcare is vital it’s still important that it be done ethically and held to the same standards as other healthcare. But no, instead it was basically a referendum on whether medical transition is good/bad. Again. Fucks sake.

(For non-UK people, Gender GP are a private service for transition related healthcare but they can, or have in the past, worked with the NHS to provide shared care e.g. blood tests for HRT monitoring. It is needed because it’s a very, very, very long drawn out and difficult process to access NHS transition care.) The podcast’s thesis was that the founder of Gender GP (a cis GP named Helen Webberley) is not practicing ethical healthcare because there isn’t enough assessment before providing HRT. They do treat children but the majority of their customers are adults. However you can guess which demographic was focused on. No children or adults who had undergone treatment with Gender GP were interviewed. There was a suggestion from the interviewer that maybe Helen Webberley is y’know a little bit ditzy, naive as hell of course, but also isn’t she bad for making money out of this? In this way she is juxtaposed against the NHS, which is the Good and Right way to transition, because they don’t profit off trans kids I guess. This argument stops working in any country that doesn’t have free at point of use healthcare of any kind, but never mind that. Also the podcast to its credit acknowledges several times that there are no currently practicing NHS gender clinics in the UK, and that this is a problem. But that’s about all we get in that department. There’s a waiting list, but no clinics. That list gets longer and longer. It’s so fucked up.

I would argue that the podcast is sceptical about the entire concept of being transgender, and I wonder if they even realise this about themselves. Two mothers of trans sons are interviewed, one who used Gender GP and one who accessed black market hormones. The first mother says that Gender GP ruined her child. But she was still referring to her child as her daughter and using she/her. You would think that if medical transition was the only concern, the mother would have been fine with the social and 100% reversable changes in pronouns and name. I know it’s hard for someone who has known you their whole life as one name and set of pronouns to remember at first, but this was different, she just hadn’t done anything. Without saying it out loud she was clearly waiting for it all to blow over, and not even considering that it might not. Meanwhile the child’s father (they were divorced) is helping the child access Gender GP, which can’t have helped matters. The mother sadly laments how Gender GP tore her family apart. The 2nd mother was worried about her child accessing black market hormones and using home syringes. This is a valid worry. However she also referred to her child purely as daughter, she/her and actively aschewed his new name. I don’t even know why she was interviewed as her son wasn’t using Gender GP, and this wasn’t a perspective about what Gender GP was clearly designed to be- a safer option in between black market hormones and the endless wait for the NHS. It was very clear she was even more ‘wait for it to blow over’ than the first interviewee. She spoke with apparent disgust (though to be fair was voiced by an actor who may have been hamming it up a bit) that since socially transitioning at school her child was suddenly really popular and was liked by many people he wasn’t before, and they all loved using his new name....that part felt especially weird, like she was angry that her child was being called a name he preferred by his friends. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of parents alluding to children coming out as trans at school to become popular. I read an article where a parent was relaying what their child had said, where apparently their classmate came out as trans in assembly and everybody clapped. The idea that there might be other factors involved, such as novelty that will wear off for the classmates, the classroom social standing of the child in question, or even in the case of the 2nd podcast interviewee’s son, increased confidence post coming out making him more sociable, was ignored. I do understand that this is a relatively new area of medicine without much long term data to draw on. However all types of healthcare has to start somewhere, and I wouldn’t have thought that the fear of an army of angry and betrayed detransitioners one day (which the interviewer was clearly disappointed that Webberley had never seen) should hold back progress. There are older adults who transitioned as children out in the world. On tumblr almost a decade ago I remember young trans guys in parts of the US accessing hormones through informed consent clinics, to much hand wringing from certain reactionary internet circles-see if you can contact those people. How are they doing?

There is so much more I could talk about but I have to stop there or I’ll go on all night. Edited to add: this should not be interpreted as a defence of Helen Webberley, only as a condemnation of the podcast episode’s framing of the concept of gender services that don’t require stringent assessment as very dangerous and scary and automatically malpractice. There’s a reason why I listened in the first place- because I had heard not great things about Gender GP. Sadly I didn’t get a look at its problems and its founder’s problems, I got yet another highly biased condemnation of the entire concept of transness with way too much airtime for parents who don’t believe their teenage children have their own internal selves.

Edit again: I understand now what the podcast was saying about clinics- there are currently no gender clinics in England that treat children. There are a few in the country that treat adults over 18, and the waiting lists are really long but at least you can refer to one in any region. My referral was for Nottingham even though I’m in the south as it currently has the shortest waiting list on the tracker.

[quordleona03]

[nurse-averse]

Unionizing, striking, a sweet pup who supports our union

(her name is Zelda and she wasn't on ice for more than a few minutes, her owner who came to stand with us picked her up very quickly and then moved to a sheltered picket line space)

[themistressofdolls]

I think anyone who even floats the notion of healthcare privatization in the UK or Scotland needs to be forced to watch this.

[fondwand]

I'm really panicked about the Cass Report sitch in the UK right now. I just have this horrible, sickened feeling. the articles proclaiming about the 'puberty blocker scandal' as if the report said that puberty blockers had been proven harmful, and not just that the report reoghtfully claimed that there hadn't been enough research.... which is basically the exact same situation as such medications as SSRIs, birth control in the NHS and yet those situations won't be used to bolster and reaffirm a hateful congregation of idiotic transphobes with too much power into dragging trans rights and healthcare in the UK through subsequent decades of incredibly harmful stagnation, fearmongering, and outright harm.

the Cass Report seems to me only to confirm what we know about almost every other sector of the NHS: that it's broken, underfunded, bogged down in failing beurocracy and not interested in preventative care as its mainline strategy. that's a position where the blame should be laid at the feet of the Conservative party, not at the feet of people who believe trans people should have adequate care which as at least a first line BELIEVES THEM

calling this a 'watershed' moment as if giving trans individuals gender affirming care is evil, while everyday within the NHS racism, medical misogyny, regional disparities between the North (edited add wales also) and Souths standards of healthcare which cause life expectancy to be lower, a mental health sector which is so utterly broken it can't actually help anyone. ..... etc etc etc are happening. its transphobia. its just hateful transphobia. transphobia which is now seen to be validated by idiots

I feel so sick and scared

[totallyhussein-blog]

Be Inspired by A.J. Cronin

Archibald Joseph Cronin is best known as A. J. Cronin and was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known novel is The Citadel which was published in 1937 and is a story about a Scottish doctor who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London. The themes explored in The Citadel inspired the creation of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) after World War Two.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“There are thousands of FGM survivors like Araweelo across the country. In 2011, the Home Office data estimated there were 137,000 people living with FGM in England and Wales, but with more than 5,800 survivors newly identified by the NHS between April 2022 and March 2023, the numbers could be much higher.

In 2014, the government and NHS England launched a £1.4m FGM prevention programme to educate healthcare professionals, and NHS guidance states that such professionals should seek to support women by “offering referral to community groups for support, clinical intervention or other services as appropriate, for example through an NHS FGM clinic”. Yet this year, nearly a decade later, an independent report carried out by the Vavengers – a London-based charity fighting FGM - showed that two thirds of the 670 NHS staff surveyed reported receiving either no or minimal training on how to deal with survivors.

…

Charities, pressure groups and FGM experts say that the UK is lagging far behind in offering survivors surgical reconstruction. There are now 26 clinics across 11 different European countries offering reconstructive surgery to FGM victims.

Many groups believe that British doctors already possess the required skills to perform such surgeries on survivors but that their injuries are simply not being considered a priority.”

[nando161mando]

NSW nurses and midwives strike: hospital wait times up and surgery delays expected

#australia #nurses

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/10/nurses-midwives-strike-nsw-hospitals-pay-rise-premier-chris-minns