Telling patients I can’t get their life-saving medication is awful. The government must act to prevent a real tragedy

• Mike Hewitson owns a pharmacy in west Dorset

For the past 16 years, I have run a small community pharmacy in rural west Dorset. My business is older than me – the little yellow-brick building I own is about to turn 235. Right now, I am really concerned about it getting through the next 12 months.

In my years as a pharmacist, I have never seen things as bad as they are at the moment. We are going through a period of rampant drug shortages in England, caused by global shortages, the NHS’s insistence on paying unsustainably low prices for medicines and Brexit, among other things, and people are on the brink. Long gone are the days when customers could place a prescription order safe in the knowledge their life-saving medication would arrive the next day.

Mike Hewitson owns a pharmacy in west Dorset and is a member of the Community Pharmacy England network. As told to Poppy Noor

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Andy Evans was injecting his own clotting protein at three, and was 13 when he found it had given him HIV. Now he campaigns for fellow survivors – and the truth about the contamination scandal

• The children of the contaminated blood scandal | Today in Focus

Andy Evans was 13 when his mum took him for an unexpected drive in the countryside. “I thought: this is weird. Why are we here? We don’t do this,” he remembered. “We sat for a couple of minutes and then she turned to me with tears in her eyes. And she said: ‘Do you know what HIV is?’ And I said: ‘Well, I’ve heard of it … Isn’t it that disease that kills you?’ And she said: ‘Yep, that’s right. It’s been in the factor VIII and you’ve got it.’”

Factor VIII was the concentrated blood clotting protein he had been receiving for his haemophilia since being diagnosed as a baby. Touted as a wonder drug to stop internal bleeding, it was so easy to mix with water and inject with a syringe that Evans was able to administer it himself at home before his fourth birthday.

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Exclusive: Royal College of GPs says constitution guarantee would just pile on pressure given loss of 1,000 practices in past 10 years

Seven in 10 people want to be able to see a GP urgently within 24 hours, research by the NHS’s patient watchdog has found.

Almost three-quarters (71%) of voters in England support automatic access to a family doctor within one day of requesting an appointment for a health problem they consider cannot wait.

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The number of people stuck in hospital for more than three weeks has risen 15% on pre-Covid levels

Strike action and the social care crisis have left thousands more people trapped in hospital beds with nowhere to go while other patients struggle to access the care, nullifying an increase in funding and NHS staff, it has been reported.

A damning internal review of NHS efficiency carried out last year has reportedly revealed that, despite a £20bn increase in funding since 2018 and 15% more doctors and nurses on the NHS payroll, the health service was carrying out only slightly more routine treatments than it was before Covid.

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But coroner finds no evidence to suggest trust directly caused death of Maya Siek in December 2022

An inquest into the death of a six-year-old girl has concluded an NHS hospital trust made a “number of failures” in her care before she died.

However, a coroner found there was no evidence that suggested the trust had directly caused or contributed to the death of Maya Siek in December 2022.

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The opposition leader knows that he is being measured for the highest office in the land

The outward purpose of Labour’s campaign event in Thurrock on Thursday was to launch Sir Keir Starmer’s six “first steps” commitments , most of which were already familiar in some way. This was duly done, and with presentational panache. But the event had a far larger objective – to make it clear to the public that the Labour party is now ready to govern Britain.

In all but name this was a general election campaign launch, even though the vote is probably months away . The shadow cabinet was there, seated in rows. The event was professionally prepared, choreographed to include personal stories, none more powerful than that from the cancer patient Nathaniel Dye. There were also important video endorsements of Labour, including from the CEO of Boots, Seb James , and from the former senior Met police officer Neil Basu . Each pledge was presented by the relevant shadow minister. It was structured and slick, evidence of a party that knows what it is doing.

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Commitments range from cutting NHS waiting times to delivering economic stability – and are united in a lack of detail

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has unveiled six commitments which, he said, would constitute the first steps taken by a Labour government. The Labour leader was reluctant to use the word “pledge”, but the six statements inevitably drew comparisons with Tony Blair’s 1997 pledge card.

Unlike Labour’s promises going into that election, however, the steps Starmer outlined were generally vague and their success is likely to prove difficult to measure.

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An NHS trust’s attempts to bring a crucial drug to market itself is hopeful news for patients

• Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc

Healthcare should make people’s lives better. That fact can hardly be contested. Yet for some patients with rare diseases, commercial interests are dictating who gets to access life-saving treatment and who doesn’t. Pharmaceutical companies have long been driven by global demand and the potential for the highest profits. In the past two decades, the market has exploded: pharma revenues worldwide have exceeded $1tn . For patients with common conditions, this investment in healthcare can only be good news. But the narrow focus of this strategy means that, in the UK, the one in 17 of us who will at some point be affected by a rare condition risk being forgotten.

That is until now. Healthcare providers, driven by a desire to make life-saving treatments more widely available, are increasingly finding new ways of getting them to patients for whom they would have previously been out of reach. Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) recently announced that it was taking the unprecedented step of attempting to obtain the licence itself for a rare gene therapy on a non-profit basis, after the pharmaceutical company that planned to bring it to market dropped out. If successful, it will be the first time that an NHS trust has the authorisation to market a drug for this kind of treatment. The move could act as a proof of concept for bringing drugs to UK patients that pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to risk their profits on.

Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc

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A brilliantly funny but deadly serious account of NHS psychiatry in crisis

On his first day as a trainee ­psychiatrist, Dr Benji Waterhouse ­–conflict averse, bookish, balding – receives a crash course in martial arts. A brawny ex-policeman with tumescent biceps exhorts the gaggle of junior doctors never to wear a tie unless they want to getthrottled, never to make a patient a cup of hot tea unless they want to get scalded, and to always sit in the chair closest to the door in case their life depends on ­making a quick getaway.

It’s the start of a litany of rude awakenings, documented in brisk and self-deprecating style. Waterhouse’s decision to specialise in psychiatry, for example, is dismissed by one medical consultant as “a waste of a perfectly good doctor”. A cardiologist tells him a psychiatrist is nothing more than “a social worker with a stethoscope”. Nevertheless, he arrives for his first job on an acute psychiatric ward buoyed up by the conviction that he is going to help his patients live happier and more fulfilling lives. The ward handover is dominated by a clipboard-wielding bed manager who sneers at the patients, belittles the junior doctors, and whose sole measure of success is how quickly he can pressure the team into discharging the inpatients. When Waterhouse meets his first patient – a young woman called Paige with a tortured history of neglect, abuse, prison, addiction and innumerable episodes of self-harm – the consultant in charge dismisses it all. “There’s no true mental illness there. It’s all just personality disorder and drug-seeking behaviour and there are no wonder drugs for that,” says the fearsome Dr Glick (names have been changed). Even Paige’s threat to jump out of her flat window is derided, since she only lives on the second floor.

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