News

The NHS’s staffing and financial problems are the worst they have ever been, official health service figures show.

The number of vacancies across the NHS in England has hit a record high while NHS bosses have disclosed for the first time the service’s underlying deficit built up over recent years – £4.3bn.

Six times more children and young people in England have mental health conditions than a generation ago, research has revealed.

The proportion of four to 24-year-olds who said, or whose parents said, they had a longstanding mental health condition rose from 0.8% in 1995 to 4.8% in 2014, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

The University of Birmingham is conducting a research project about social care services. This project is looking at what Councils can do to support people access good quality care services and we want to talk to people who have experience of being an unpaid carer to learn more about their thoughts about the social care system.

The project is also looking at the ways that people access information about social care services, in addition to the experiences of carers. As someone who has experience of supporting a friend or family member in their day-to-day life, your views are important to the project.

The government wants thousands of children in the most disadvantaged areas of Britain to join uniformed groups like the Scouts, Guides and military cadet forces, it will announce this week.

Tracey Crouch, the minister for sports and civil society, will launch a £5m budget to create 5,500 extra places in the country’s toughest areas in uniformed youth groups including St John Ambulance, the Volunteer Police Cadets and Woodcraft Folk.

Growing numbers of teenagers in England and Wales are killing themselves, official figures show, sparking fresh concern about the deepening crisis in young people’s mental health.

There were 177 suicides among 15- to 19-year-olds in 2017, compared with 110 in 2010 and more than in every year since then except 2015, when the toll was 186, the Office of National Statistics data shows.

Almost half of maternity units at hospitals in England were closed to expectant mothers at least once during 2017, research by Labour has found, with the party blaming staff shortages and other resourcing problems.

Freedom of information (FoI) requests by Labour identified almost 300 occasions when maternity units were closed and expectant mothers sent elsewhere, with the most common reasons cited being a lack of capacity and staffing issues.

Carer’s Allowance in Scotland is going up by £8.50 per week to the same level as Jobseeker’s Allowance which Carers UK welcomed. In the short term, Carers UK is campaigning for Carer’s Allowance in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to be raised by at least £8.50 to match these changes.

A huge surge in measles cases across Europe has been reported by the World Health Organisation, which says low MMR vaccination rates are to blame.

More than 41,000 cases of measles have been reported in the European region between January and June. Last year there were nearly 24,000 for the whole 12 months, which was the highest count in any year of the last decade.

The number of heart attacks and strokes in England will soar in the next two decades as the diabetes epidemic sweeping the country takes its toll, a charity has warned.

The growing number of people with diabetes could trigger a 29% rise in the number of heart attacks and strokes linked to the condition by 2035, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) has predicted.

UK house price growth slowed in June to the lowest annual rate in five years, driven by falling prices in London, according to official figures.

Average house prices across the country increased 3% in the year to June, down from a 3.5% gain in May, the lowest annual rate since August 2013, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. The average price of a UK home was £228,000 – about £6,000 higher than in June 2017 and £1,000 higher than in May.