News

In brief

The NHS could collapse into disarray in the third year of operation of the NHS reforms, a simulation exercise carried out in East Anglian region has found.

According to an account in the authoritative Health Service Journal last month, a simulated “internal market” crashed in its third year of operation, by which time most arms of the service were scrambling for increasingly limited resources.

The conclusions of the management exercise have sent shock waves through the Department of Health. Sources say that 40 copies of the management report were immediately ordered by Downing Street.

The Department of the Environment has officially admitted that wave power is cheaper than nuclear power. The government’s previous opposition to wave power is based on false figures compiled for it by the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell. Revised figures show that nuclear power is by far the most expensive means of creating energy.

Delegates of a Soviet conference on sustainable development were told by environmentalist Mr Alexander Cheparukhin, that about 7,000 people who’d helped in the cleaning up after the Chernobyl disaster had since died from diseases linked with radiation.

About 1,000 people in Britain are dying each year from melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer. Scientists believe this is due to excessive exposure to ultra violet light which is a direct result of the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

A recent study for Crossroads Care, a charity that provides home helps, has revealed that half those who care for relatives at home believe they are at breaking point and one in eight is afraid of becoming violent. Of the 790 people interviewed, 66% were women and well over half had had been caring their own for over five years.

A campaign to bring NHS ancillary workers’ pay in line with local government levels was given the backing of delegates at the NUPE conference in Blackpool, which represented more than 600,000 workers. Current basic pay for ancillary workers ranges from £92.83 to £121.45 a week.

Research carried out by doctors in east London has confirmed the link between child health and deprivation. The study which is to be published in June was based on interviews with families of 445 children admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children. The findings revealed that half the children had no working parent and 59 per cent lived in overcrowded accommodation.