Young people’s mental health services need cash not empty promises | Clare Allan

It’s good to talk, and at the moment there’s a lot of talk about mental health and, in particular, about the mental health of young people.

I’m thinking, of course, of Theresa May’s recent speech, in which she announced a government green paper on children and young people’s mental health services, mental health first aid training for schools and a few other measures – to be funded apparently out of thin air – because mental health has been “a hidden injustice in this country” for far too long. From whom this injustice has been hidden was not specified.

BBC Radio 1, 1Xtra and Asian Network on Wednesday launched a year-long campaign “to encourage young people to explore issues surrounding their mental health”. My Mind and Me aims “to get young people talking about mental health, to reduce stigma around mental illness, and to raise awareness and understanding of mental health issues that affect young people”.

To assist them in this, they have partnered with the National Citizen Service (NCS) to create a group of “social action champions”, a group of young people from across the UK, who will work with the stations to help shape the campaign, sharing their own experience and leading discussions on “the key issues around mental health”.

Giving young people a platform to discuss these issues is certainly important. There is nothing more powerful than hearing directly from people about their experience, especially from people who are far too often stereotyped or simply ignored altogether. To hear an individual talk on their own terms and in their own words allows for a human-to-human connection that cuts through cliches and stereotypes. The result can be transforming. And as Ben Cooper, controller at Radio 1, 1Xtra and Asian Network, put it:“From prime ministers to our young listeners, we all recognise the need to change attitudes to mental health.”

It’s good to talk, but I cannot help feeling there is something of an elephant in the room. I confess that I listened to Theresa May’s speech, and much of the discussion that followed it, with my jaw hanging apishly open.

This government and the previous one have presided over the decimation of mental health services – “a car crash”, according to Prof Dame Sue Bailey, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, speaking in 2014. She was just one of a chorus of voices, from patient groups to professional bodies, carers and mental health charities, all shouting the loudest, most urgent of warnings – it certainly wasn’t hidden from the government.

And between 2010 and 2015 funding for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) was slashed by £50m, despite massively increasing demand.

Even setting aside both of those things, consider how, as a society, we are failing our young people.

However inconvenient the fact may be, mental health is not some discrete entity. The mental wellbeing of young people cannot be considered in isolation from the issues that affect their lives: the education system, benefits, housing, employment practices. In all these areas, the needs of young people have been trampled on over and over again by the boots of political expediency. And now they are supposed to believe we care about their mental wellbeing.

It may be that My Mind and Me is going to address these issues and I very much hope it does.

In 2016, winners of Radio 1’s Teen Awards, which included a mental health category, were invited to meet the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who praised their “inspirational work”. All fine, except that mental health problems have repeatedly been shown to be most prevalent in those countries with the highest levels of financial and social inequality.

And I know it seems churlish to point that out, but it would really be the bitterest of ironies if raising awareness of mental health issues became a means of avoiding confronting the factors that contribute to them.

Young people’s mental health services need cash not empty promises | Clare Allan

Jeremy Hunt promises better mental health services for children and adolescents

Jeremy Hunt has promised to tackle the “big problems” and failings in NHS services for children and young people with mental health problems which he says are causing “too many tragedies”.

The health secretary singled out children and adolescent mental health services (Camhs) as “the biggest single area of weakness in NHS provision at the moment” in an interview with the Health Service Journal.

Hunt pledged to make support and treatment for young people a priority in an interview in which he said he wanted to continue in his role for another two or three years so he can oversee permanent improvements to the NHS.

He said that too many young people and families are being let down by the NHS because of problems in the availability of services, which meant that problems were being left untreated, sometimes for years.

Schools should work more closely with NHS Camhs teams and more schools should have counsellors on their premises to try to ensure more young people got help faster, he said.

“I think we are letting down too many families and not intervening early enough when there is a curable mental health condition, which we can do something about when a child is eight or nine but if you leave it until they are 15 or 16 it’s too late.

“There are big problems with the capacity in Camhs services but it’s not just there, but [also] what happens in schools. Very few schools have a full-time Camhs worker,” Hunt told the HSJ.

“I think this is possibly the biggest single area of weakness in NHS provision at the moment. There are too many tragedies because children develop eating disorders or psychosis or chronic depression, which is then very difficult to put right as they get older,” he added.

The Guardian revealed this month that almost a quarter of a million children and young people aged 18 and below are being treated for mental health problems by the NHS in England every month, but that that was a significant underestimate of the true scale of the problem as only 60% of the 63 NHS mental health trusts supplied data to NHS Digital, which collated the figures.

Jeremy Hunt promises better mental health services for children and adolescents

Jeremy Hunt promises to end NHS reliance on overseas doctors after Brexit

Jeremy Hunt is to pledge that the NHS in England will be “self sufficient” regarding doctor numbers after Britain leaves the European Union, as he sets out a package of measures aimed at reducing its reliance on foreign-trained medics.

The health secretary will use his speech to the Conservative party conference on Tuesday to promise that medical schools in the UK will be allowed to offer up to 1,500 extra training places every year, and released figures that said that one in four NHS doctors have been trained abroad.

Hunt will stress that foreign-trained doctors do a “fantastic job”, and say that “we want EU nationals who are already here to be able to stay post-Brexit” – but he will also ask: “Is it right to import doctors from poorer countries that need them while turning away bright home graduates desperate to study medicine?”

He wants NHS England to reach the target in 2025. “Of course it will take a number of years before those doctors qualify, but by the end of the next parliament we will make the NHS self- sufficient in doctors,” Hunt is to add.

Remain campaigners warned in the run-up to the referendum that the NHS, which relies heavily on foreign staff, would be hit if EU workers could no longer travel freely to work in the UK. Data from the General Medical Council records that 30,472 doctors come from the EU and other countries in the European Economic Area, while 71,139 were trained elsewhere in the world outside the UK.

Hunt hopes that by boosting the number of places now, he will have a pipeline of British-trained doctors ready in time. There is rapidly accumulating evidence that doctor shortages are causing serious problems, including the part-closure of A&E units at hospitals in Chorley, Lancashire and Grantham in Lincolnshire.

The move represents a partial U-turn by Hunt, as until now he has repeatedly responded to evidence of understaffing by pointing out that the NHS in England has more doctors now than when the coalition took office in 2010. Currently half of those people applying for medical school are rejected, because of the limits on the number of places.

A Royal College of Physicians report last month, which said the NHS was understaffed and overstretched, irritated health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Before individual medical schools are allowed to lift the cap on training places, they will have to show the government they are taking steps to attract students from deprived economic backgrounds.

Trainee doctors will have to work in the NHS for four years before they can accept overseas postings in an attempt to avoid a rapid exodus of people trained in the UK. Many young doctors head to Australia and elsewhere overseas, and increasing numbers say they want to go abroad as the protracted junior doctors dispute has dragged on.

Medical organisations welcomed what the British Medical Association said was Hunt’s belated recognition that the NHS is under-doctored, especially in specialities such as A&E, paediatrics, anaesthesia and psychiatry. But they warned that the health service would not benefit from the extra medics for another decade and that others were were needed to tackle doctor shortages.

“While it is welcome that he has finally admitted the government has failed to train enough doctors to meet rising demand, this announcement falls far short of what is needed”, said Dr Mark Porter, the BMA’s chair. “We desperately need more doctors, particularly with the government plans for further seven-day services, but it will take a decade for extra places at medical school to produce more doctors. This initiative will not stop the NHS from needing to recruit overseas staff.”

The Department of Health is expected to publish a consultation paper on the details of the plans later in the autumn.

Hunt was irritated last month when a report from the Royal College of Physicians, which represents hospital doctors, said that the NHS was “underfunded, under-doctored [and] overstretched.”

Welcoming Hunt’s plan, RCP president Prof Jane Dacre said: “The RCP has long argued that rota gaps and staff shortages are the greatest threat to patient safety and have significantly contributed to low morale among junior doctors. The NHS needs more doctors, and this dramatic increase in medical school places will help relieve many of the pressures faced by the NHS in the long-term, and support a more sustainable workforce.”

Dr Simon Clark, workforce officer for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, cautioned that “with 30% of doctors deciding to take a break from medicine in the UK for a period of time before they take up speciality training, government must address the retention, attrition and career hiatus that occurs.” Ministers would need to ensure that the extra doctors would be deployed in the areas of England which are facing the greatest shortages, he added.

Labour’s shadow health secretary, Diane Abbott, said: “It appears that Hunt has taken a chapter from the Hard Brexiter’s Myth book. The idea that we can be self-sufficient in medical staff is nonsense.”

“The true picture is that the NHS has never been in a more perilous state and the Tories are cutting the health budget by £22bn.

“The reality is that Hunt has lost the trust of the medical profession and is the least popular health minister in recent history. Morale among NHS staff is at rock bottom and Hunt has shown once again just how little regard he has for the hard-working people that keep our health service running.”

The first of the extra places, which could eventually increase the number of trainee doctors by up to a quarter, will start to become available from 2018-19.

The Department of Health, which subsidises medical students by funding their clinical placements in hospitals, will pay for the expansion from its existing budget.

It plans to offset part of the cost – expected to be £100m in total by 2021 – by forcing foreign medical students to pay for their own clinical placements.

That will increase fees for medical school for students from overseas – but Department for Health sources pointed out that the current £9,000 a year is far lower than the fees for other prestigious international medical schools.

Jeremy Hunt promises to end NHS reliance on overseas doctors after Brexit

Owen Smith promises to protect the NHS – video

Owen Smith, the contender for the Labour leadership, pledges support to National Health Service to promote his campaign on Monday. Speaking from the University of Salford, Smith said a 100% free public health service was an institution to be cherished and criticised Conservative party funding cuts

Owen Smith promises to protect the NHS – video

Google Flu Trends promises are overstated, researchers say

Google Flu Trends and other hopes of offering public health breakthroughs by analysing enormous quantities of health care data have been overstated, according to a new research published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“If we actually began relying on the claims made by huge information surveillance in public well being, we would come to some peculiar conclusions, mentioned John Ayers, a investigation professor at San Diego State University who was lead author on the study. “Some of these conclusions might even pose serious public overall health harm.”

The finding casts doubt on claims manufactured by Google’s chief executive Larry Page that a lot more evaluation of peoples’ well being data could conserve up to 100,000 lives per year. Speaking this 12 months, Web page stated that extreme worries about privacy had been holding back developments in the discipline. Web page has not specified how the figure for lives saved is calculated.

Ayers informed the Guardian: “Massive information has huge value, and that consists of saving lives. But to realise these gains we require far better science.”

Nevertheless the authors of the new review stage out that even one particular of Google’s easiest health information mining systems, Google Flu Trends, has constantly failed to offer valuable forecasts of flu circumstances in the US. Google Flu Trends tries to use searches made by way of the website to predict forthcoming numbers of influenza circumstances in the US.

In March 2014 David Lazer, an associate professor at Northeastern University, published a paper showing that Google Flu Trends had overestimated flu degree for one hundred out of 108 weeks when in contrast with authoritative figures from the US Centres for Ailment Control (CDC).

However, Ayers’s staff showed that they could use open-source, publicly obtainable data from Google’s archive to substantially boost the accuracy of the flu prediction.

Rather than monitoring a distinct group of influenza-associated queries – as Google does – they monitored how the queries altered, and gave some queries much more bodyweight than others. They also built in an automated updating system utilizing artificial intelligence methods which adjusted the bias offered to any query each week, rather than the occasional guide program that as Google uses.

They showed that that was far more precise throughout the flu seasons in both 2009 and 2012/13 than Google’s model for every single week.

“With these tweaks, Google Flu Trends could live up to the high expectations it originally aspired to,” Ayers explained.

The researchers pointed out the Google generally predicted far much more circumstances than occurred. In the 2012/13 season, Google’s technique predicted that ten.6% of the population had flu – compared to just six.one% in accordance to patient records, an overstatement of 73%. The revised model recommended 7.seven% infection – a 26% overstatement.

“Big data is no substitute for great strategies, and consumers need to better discern great from bad methods,” Ayers explained.

Like Lazer previously, one of the new paper’s co-authors, Benjamin Althouse, recommended that much more clarity was needed about the models used by “big data” analysis to create public well being details and advice. “When dealing with large information methods, it is very crucial to make positive they are transparent and free of charge,” Althouse said. “Reproducibility and validation are keystones of the scientific strategy, and they must be at the centre of the huge information revolution.”

Google declined to comment particularly on the new paper, but reiterated an earlier comment on Lazer’s research: “We assessment the Flu Trends model every single 12 months to establish how we can boost. We welcome suggestions on how we can refine Flu Trends to assist estimate flu ranges and complement current surveillance techniques.”

Ayers mentioned that the paper’s critiques had been not an indictment of the promise of large information. “We undoubtedly don’t want any single entity or investigator, allow alone Google — whch has been at the forefront of building and sustaining these techniques — to feel like they are unfairly the targets of our criticism,” Ayers said.

“It’s going to take the total neighborhood recognizing and rectifying existing shortcomings. When we do, big data will undoubtedly yield massive impacts.”

• We’re all getting mined for huge information – but who are the real winners?

Google Flu Trends promises are overstated, researchers say

The widget that promises to silence the snorers

As effectively as minimizing the amount of apnoea fatalities (the problem doubled people’s probabilities of dying within the period studied), the Remede will also, it is anticipated, relieve the burden on the nation’s legal program. How? By cutting down the number of murders carried out by sleep-deprived household members who have found that no foam-based earplug will ever neutralise the nightly solo.

And let no a single feel for one particular minute that snoring is to be taken lightly. We could give it a bit of a jokey, outdated-guy title, compared with the onomatopoeic French word ronflement and the gutturally ghastly German term schnarchen, but the fact stays that, on any provided evening, nearly half the adult population of the United kingdom engages in a bit of audible passage-clearing.

When upon a time, the bedrooms of Britain had been alive with Kinsey researchers investigating our really like lives. These days, although, figures compiled by the British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association reveal that a nightmarish 41.five per cent of adults engage in the audible crime that is fatty-tissue flatulence.

And don’t think it is just male sleepers who register large scores on the ronflement scale. Once again, the BSASAA is on hand with the sobering statistic that for each and every two.3 men who snore, there is 1 lady matching them grunt for snuffle.

Given that one particular of these serial-schnarchers is my wife (I really don’t snore, but make an annoying tongue-clicking), there must be a lot of partners of each sexes for whom rest is not so much a matter of gently drifting off as becoming constantly frightened by a foghorn.

Certainly, when I dipped a tentative foot into the snoring pond, some surprising revelations rose up from the deep. “One morning, after a night away, the family members sharing a room, I woke up with a vague recollection of my eight-12 months-old daughter attempting to smother me with a pillow,” volunteered 1 father. “When I asked her if this could be true, she explained, ‘Yes, Daddy. You were snoring.’”

Which factors to the irony of the entire thing, in that the snorer has – at the time – no concept they are keeping any person awake. A single wife even paid testimony to her husband’s impeccable manners every time jabbed with the elbow of retribution. “He will invariably apologise with the best politeness, and turn above,” she sighed. “And in the morning, he never ever has the faintest recollection. It is fully unconscious.”

At the identical time, however, it turned out that rather significantly less of the spirit of the Geneva Convention applied in yet another marital bed. “My wife presented me with a recording on her iPhone of my snoring,” testified one husband. “I may possibly well have to retaliate – right after all, she’s got a cold at the second.”

But stunned even though the snorer could be to wake up and be presented with audio evidence of their crimes, there is, says the NHS internet site, no mystery about why people snore.

“Fatty tissue around your neck squeezes the airways and prevents air from flowing in and out freely,” it says. “Also, alcohol brings about the muscle tissues to loosen up far more than normal for the duration of a standard night’s rest. This additional relaxation of the muscle tissues can make the back of the throat collapse much more readily, which then leads to snoring.

“Cigarette smoke irritates the lining of the nasal cavity and throat, leading to swelling and catarrh. And getting overweight by just a handful of kilograms can lead to snoring.”

In other phrases, it’s all our fault. If only we weighed less, smoked less, had a sub-16½ in neck size, and downed our last drink at least 4 hours just before we went to bed, the rafters would not resound about us.

Personally, however, I’d like to place in a word for the behaviour which, in my knowledge, is the single most influential element in snore-provoking: lying on your back. I don’t hold a clipboard record, but every time I wake up in the middle of the night, from a dream which involves Mount Etna erupting, I am confronted with the identical tableau.

Instead of lying at the nice, neat, BSASAA-accredited 90-degree angle to her pillow, my wife has shifted place and adopted a sprawling, flat-on-her-back posture. Not only that but her mouth is in complete, wide-open, insect-catching mode, and her lips are doing the variety of breezy burbling that starts off really gently, but then builds up a complete-throated snore-roar.

The only advantage of the kids getting left home is that I can beat a bleary retreat to a single of their rooms at the back of the house, the place the sounds of 747s arriving at Heathrow come as a welcome lullaby to my ears.

Once, when unable to rest since of wifegrowl, I even went downstairs to search for a remedy on the pc, where, I identified the following, chilling words: “Snoring,” I read, “cannot be cured, but it can be controlled.”

And that, it appears, is that. Just as no a single actually bothers that males in the United kingdom have a three-year lower existence expectancy than women, so no one looks that concerned that, each night, some 15 million people in the United kingdom send up a cacophonous chorus of snoring.

Now, however, hope might be on hand. Testing of the Remede device in America has developed quantifiably higher “sleep efficiency” among the folks who have attempted it, and given them an alternative to obtaining to wear a breathing mask.

Personally, I’d be fine if my wife wore a mask, so prolonged as it wasn’t 1 with a frightening encounter. Even far better, even though, would be if, as an alternative of me shoving her into a sideways, snore-free position, an implant did it for me. I really don’t mind receiving the blame for often waking her up. But it would be great if, every single so often, I could get a matchbox to do it for me. Am I prepared for the Remede? Yes, by all that goes bump in the night, I am.

The widget that promises to silence the snorers

Bill Shorten: "This is a budget of broken promises"

Labor will vote against $ 12bn in spending budget measures – including GP co-payments, increased fuel taxes, stripping rewards from single-mother or father households, cuts to pensions and larger pupil loan repayments – to stop a “brutal” budget from creating a new Australian “underclass”.

In his spending budget in reply speech Thursday evening, Bill Shorten did not explicitly say how Labor will vote on the two% “deficit tax” hike on earnings over $ 180,000, but it is likely to let the temporary tax rise by means of, along with strategies to freeze other household payments and government benefits.

The $ 7 co-payment for visits to the GP, the prepare for reduced annual increases in the pension and an boost in the pension age, and having to pay unemployment positive aspects for only six months of the 12 months to beneath 30s are all also opposed by the Greens and the Palmer United party, meaning they are very likely to be blocked in the Senate that sits from July. Labor will oppose the fuel tax rise, but it could be supported by the Greens – despite the fact that they would like to quit the money getting totally directed towards roads funding.

The fate of other measures in the Abbott government’s very first spending budget, including limiting particular single-revenue household payments to families with youngsters younger than six and forcing students to shell out larger curiosity charges on their loans, now lies with the Palmer United party and other crossbench senators.

Shorten utilised the televised deal with to denounce the government as heartless, divisive, “tea-party style” ideologues bent on dividing the nation.

He explained he was speaking on behalf of Australians “shocked by the brutality of this government’s attack on their way of life” and by “a spending budget that goes out of its way to generate an underclass”.

He explained the price range would increase the cost of living for each and every Australian family members, and cited modelling displaying that a single income loved ones living on $ 65,000 with two young children would be $ 1,700 worse off this yr and $ six,000-a-year worse off by 2016 – and if the family had typical health care costs it would be an additional $ 270 a 12 months out of pocket.

“This is a spending budget drawn up by individuals who have never lived from shell out cheque to pay cheque,” he stated.

He also promised to fight against the $ 80bn in cuts to forecast federal funding to the states for schools and hospitals, but as will be incorporated in the budget appropriation payments, it is not something the Senate can block.

Pointing out the cuts represented 80% of the “savings” in Tuesday’s budget, Shorten said Joe Hockey had “in an incompetent and cowardly way … [and] outsourced the major burden of his cost savings process to the states”.

Greens leader senator Christine Milne also gave a speech in reply to the budget final night, responding to Abbott’s veiled threats that an obstructionist Senate could consequence in a double-dissolution election with a easy reply: “Bring it on.”

“We will stand up to prime minister Abbott every stage of the way, and we will block these cruel price range cuts. Prime minister Abbott has threatened to go to a double-dissolution election if the Senate doesn’t give him what he wants. Properly, the Greens say, deliver it on! Carry it on, Mr Abbott, we couldn’t be a lot more passionate or a lot more committed to kicking your mob out and stopping the damage you are making an attempt to inflict on men and women, the setting and our nation,” Milne mentioned.

The Coalition had challenged Shorten to set out substitute methods to lessen the price range deficit, pointing to the reality that Abbott outlined cost savings in his ultimate budget speech in reply as opposition leader. Shorten did not, making use of his speech solely to attack the government.

In the reply speech final 12 months, then opposition leader Abbott did outline a lot of policies his government is now delivering, but he did not mention a lot of of the contentious price range income measures unveiled on Tuesday.

And in that speech Abbott also explained “governments’ 1st task is not to make your life harder … Ought to the Coalition win the election, there will be no nasty surprises and there’ll be no lame excuses. No surprises and no excuses.”

Abbott and Hockey continued to insist their spending budget was not breaking promises and that its measures may not be liked, but they were essential.

“I do not specially like the issues we have had to do to clean up Labor’s debt and deficit catastrophe … but we have to accept the soft possibilities that had been peddled by the Labor get together for 3 many years are no longer accessible to the Australian folks,” Abbott explained during query time.

“This is the government with the intestinal fortitude to do the factors the members opposite often lacked the guts to do … we have risen to the challenge of these occasions by delivering the spending budget that Australia requirements.”

But in accordance to Shorten, Abbott has delivered “a budget of broken guarantees constructed on lies”.

And state premiers proceed to react with fury at the $ 80bn minimize in their grants for hospitals and schools more than the following ten many years – a technique to force them to take into account new taxes or a greater or wider-reaching goods and solutions tax. They have convened a meeting on Sunday, and in the case of NSW premier Mike Baird and Victorian premier Denis Napthine, called Abbott to voice their anger.

Even former prime minister John Howard criticised the budget’s cuts to the single-income family members payment – family members tax benefit element B – which he introduced.

Howard was typically supportive of the spending budget method, but mentioned the family benefit cuts went “too far” and “in reality the constraining of tax positive aspects is in effect a tax rise for individuals in specific tax brackets”. Abbott explained Howard had introduced the correct policies for his time, but this government was facing various financial situations.

The measures Labor has explained it will oppose increase $ 11.95bn for the spending budget over the 4 years of the forward estimates.

Speaking soon after Shorten’s speech, Hockey explained the Labor leader had supplied not 1 single constructive solution to the budget emergency.

“She’ll be proper is not a policy solution to the price range crisis Labor left,” Hockey said.

Bill Shorten: "This is a budget of broken promises"