Health care

Sharon Kirkey – June 10, 2013

Canadian researchers are warning of an alarming and "exponential" rise in prescribing antipsychotic drugs to children.

Prescriptions for some of the most powerful psychiatric drugs on the market - so-called "second-generation" antipsychotics, or SGAs - to youth 18 and under increased 18-fold in British Columbia alone between 1996 and 2011, a new study finds, with some of the highest increases in prescriptions to boys as young as six. Children are being put on the potent drugs for a wide range of diagnoses not approved by Health Canada, the researchers say.

Lyndsay Buckland – May 27, 2013

A hotline set up so National Health Service staff in Scotland can raise their concerns about bad practice in their workplace has been branded “a waste of time” by campaigners.

The National Confidential Alert Line for NHS workers was launched in April and in its first 40 days received 34 calls from workers in Scotland, and 19 from people in other parts of the UK.

Andrew Pierce –February 22, 2013

The NHS spent £15 million in three years on gagging whistleblowers, the Mail can reveal today.  The shocking figures pile the pressure on NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson, who has clung to his £270,000 role despite presiding over the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal that cost the lives of 1,200 patients.

In just three years there were 598 ‘special severance payments’, almost all of which carried draconian confidentiality clauses aimed at silencing whistleblowers. They cost the taxpayer £14.7million, the equivalent of almost 750 nurses’ salaries.