BARNEY CALMAN: The NHS App has, apparently, been knocking around for years, offering a way for patients to book appointments, order repeat prescriptions and view medical records.
Like most doctors, my dad, a retired GP, has a fair few war stories from his days on the beat. One that’s been wheeled out a lot has been playing on my mind over the past few months: the time he saved a young man’s life by looking at the back of his throat. It’s … Read more
A week before Christmas, I got a message from my dad on WhatsApp (it took a pandemic, but he has finally got his head around using it) which started, as many of his messages do, with a ramble about the post not arriving and the garden fence falling down. And then, at the end, he … Read more
It’s been an emotional week. An 81-year-old bloke called William Shakespeare, from Warwickshire, became the second person in the world to be given a Covid-19 vaccine outside of a trial. A nice lady called Margaret was the first, but the lack of pun potential (‘Is this a needle which I see before me?’ or my … Read more
You can just picture the adverts: ‘Did you get Covid in hospital when it wasn’t your fault? Then YOU could be entitled to compensation. No win, no fee…’ Even before the pandemic, the NHS was staring down the barrel of £83 billion in negligence claims, with £4.3 billion in legal bills alone – figures that … Read more
Queues. Don’t you hate them? I do, possibly because it feels as if I’ve spent much of this year in one. Queues for the supermarket, the bank and the post office – a record one-and-a-half hours the other day. Queues to get into a restaurant, to get your hair cut. Like everyone else, just about … Read more
Dare we dream? Amid the flurry of tweets in response to our articles over the past fortnight that predicted the Government would soon strike a deal for a lifesaving cystic fibrosis drug, this simple sentence stood out. It summed up the hopes – and fears – of thousands of British families blighted by this horrible … Read more