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Health Secretary Steve Barclay outlines NHS priorities ahead of the winter
Cutting ambulance waiting times will be the “number one priority” for the NHS this winter, Steve Barclay said in his speech yesterday with the thinktank Policy Exchange.
Fuelled by a lack of workers across the entire health service, including paramedics, and a lack of beds in hospitals, the A&E crisis is also having a knock-on effect on response times. A “lack of flow within our hospitals” was highlighted as an area of concern, as Barclay told the crowd: “We currently have over 12,000 beds occupied by patients who are medically fit to discharge.”
The Health Secretary also discussed longer-term priorities for the health service, claiming there were 53,000 staff in organisations across the NHS in England “where the majority are not providing direct patient care” on top of hospital and GP management as he announced a recruitment freeze at the Department of Health and Social Care. NHS England, which holds most of the NHS budget, has already put in place a recruitment freeze.
He added: “My point is this is not just an issue of cost. It is also about effectiveness. Because too much management can be a distraction to the front line. Staff at the centre need to streamline the administrative burden of those on the front line and not risk adding to it.”
Mr Barclay added he would publish a digital map of NHS staffing, including job titles and the number of people working in each team, as well as associated costs, he said: “It will stimulate, I hope, a conversation within the NHS about how priorities and resourcing is best aligned.”
An NHS spokesman said: “The NHS is already one of the most efficient health services in the world – just 2p in every NHS pound is spent on admin, compared to double that in France and four times that in the US.”
Barclay made a call for “fewer central priorities, with a focus on those that are most impactful” across the health service. On this, he said: “I think if you have a very large centre, you have people both in the department, NHS England or the arm's length bodies, and the regional bodies, that generates lots of meetings, lots of people with different priorities. I think what gets lost sometimes within that is what delivers the biggest impact [...] If everything's a priority, nothing is a priority.”
Source: Daily Mail, 1 September 2022
See also: Telegraph - ‘Too much management’ burdens the NHS front line, warns Steve Barclay
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BMJ opinion: How “both-sideism” harms health
Richard Smith, Chair of the UK Health Alliance for Climate Change and former British Medical Journal (BMJ) Editor-in-Chief reflected on themes brought up in former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis’ recent lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, and its impacts for public health.
Writing to the BMJ he focused on what she referred in her lecture to “both-sideism,” the requirement to have both sides of an argument presented even though opinion and evidence may be overwhelmingly on one side, something that has “plagued reporting on health as well as on politics”.
Pointing to the widely recognised example of climate change discussions, the media have long “balanced” somebody talking about the impact of climate change with a climate denier—even though there had “long ceased to be any serious scientific dissent”. Smith states that the result of “both-sideism” is that it makes it seem as if both sides are equally valid, leaving viewers under the impression there was scientific debate when really there was none.
He turns to media discourse on the harmful effects of tobacco and alcohol, where this “balance” plays out too, with people from the tobacco or drink trades arguing that the evidence of harm is unconvincing or that people must be free to smoke and drink as they choose.
Smith writes: “People should, of course, be free to argue about the actions to be taken and about the evidence when it is uncertain, but does every public health spokesperson need to be balanced every time? And when does the evidence become so strong that a broadcaster no longer needs to “balance” somebody describing the evidence with somebody who doesn’t accept it?”
Smith concludes warning that with editors choosing to “err on the side of caution” and uphold “both-sideism” in many areas of health, dissenters under this principle have distorted public debate and been “given longer than is justified”.
Source: BMJ, 1 September 2022
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Reckitt shares fall after chief Laxman Narasimhan leaves to join Starbucks
Laxman Narasimhan, the chief executive of Reckitt, announced that he was leaving the FTSE 100 group after only three years. It emerged later that he is to become the boss of Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee chain.
There was criticism over the appointment of Nicandro Durante, a former chief executive of British American Tobacco, as interim chief executive at Reckitt.
Deborah Arnott, of Action on Smoking and Health, said Durante was a “bizarre choice” for Reckitt, “which says its aim is a cleaner, healthier world. This is a man who spent nearly all his working life flogging cigarettes, products which kill up to two thirds of all consumers.”
A source said that Reckitt had considered Durante’s tobacco links but was prepared to overlook the issue, given his experience running a big FTSE company and the interim nature of the role.
Durante, 65, has been on Reckitt’s board since 2013 and has been a senior independent director since 2019. He joined BAT, the maker of Lucky Strike and Dunhill cigarettes, in 1981 and held senior roles as regional director for Africa and the Middle East and chief operating officer before leading BAT from 2011 to 2019. When he left BAT three years ago and said he did not plan to take on another FTSE executive role, he was potentially in line for at least £7.5 million as part of his exit and had earned more than £50 million while chief executive.
At Reckitt Durante will be paid a salary of £1.1 million and will receive an incentive share grant of 75,000 shares and 150,000 options for the performance period 2022-24.
Source: The Times, 2 September 2022
See also: The Times Business - Mission unaccomplished for departing Reckitt boss
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Africa: Group accuses tobacco companies of tax evasion
According to a recent report presented at an event by the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) in collaboration with Tax Justice Network Africa, tobacco multinationals have been accused of $88.6 billion in tax evasion, evasion, and illicit financial flows in Africa.
The report profiled leading tobacco companies, their subsidiaries, domicile, and revenue trends in South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Egypt, and Morocco between 2010 and 2021.
In response to the report, the executive director of CISLAC, Auwal Rafsanjani, told journalists: “We are advocating for the reduction of illicit financial flow, money laundering tax evasion, and tobacco company tax avoidance, which is directly affecting our economy and development in Africa Tax Justice African network.”
Noting the increase in tobacco consumption in Africa whilst it decreases around the world, particularly the West, Rafsanjani continued: “We must demonstrate to the world the negative effects and manner in which tobacco companies are destroying Africans’ health while also promoting corruption on the continent.”
Rafsanjani added that “it is critical that we work closely with the relevant government to provide alternatives to even those farmers who are actually producing tobacco on behalf of these companies because they are not even paying them a reasonable amount and they exploit them.”
Tiemtore Salifou, Director of Custom Union and Taxation for the Economic Community of West African States, stated that the solution was to reduce tobacco consumption: “The situation in West African countries demonstrates a lack of use of taxation and a lack of synergy between tobacco control research, advocacy, and policy making.”
Source: Nigerian Watch, 1 September 2022
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ASH guidance for school and college youth vaping policies
ASH has published short guidance for schools and colleges on youth vaping and smoking to support the development of evidence-based policies, produced with support and advice from teachers with expertise in safeguarding and health education. The guidance is available here. As well as curriculum headlines the briefing includes; facts on smoking and vaping; questions to inform wider school policies and ethos, and links to helpful resources.
The guidance sits alongside the more detailed Briefing on youth vaping for local authorities published in August by ASH, endorsed by ADPH, FPH, CTSI, RSPH, Fresh and Breathe 2025 and informed by advice from regulatory authorities and academic experts from the University of Bristol, KCL and UCL.
A more detailed breakdown of youth vaping attitudes and behaviour is available in our factsheet published in July with the results from our Spring 2022 national youth survey.
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Remembering Craig Pickering
ASH is sad to announce the passing of Craig Pickering, pro bono adviser to ASH on tobacco tax policy and ex-Treasury civil servant.
His book, Death and Taxes, available at https://amzn.to/3AGWsdh brilliantly uses publicly available government documents to reveal how the British Government put tax revenues before people’s health in tobacco tax policy, from 1945 right up until the 1980s. Evidence was suppressed and distorted in the interests of maximising revenues. The Government was especially concerned not to discourage young people from taking up what was known as ‘the habit’.
It is a warning from history, well worth reading and still relevant to Britain today and the wider world.
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ASH Daily News is a digest of published news on smoking-related topics. ASH is not responsible for the content of external websites. ASH does not necessarily endorse the material contained in this bulletin.
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