Healthcare

A child with a drip stand sits beside a trolley in a corridor lit by strip lighting. A parent holds a coat and a phone. Porters and nurses pass at speed, and every few minutes someone apologises. Most people who work in emergency care have seen this scene, and until now it has been treated as an unfortunate feature of a hard month. The Health Secretary has now said that no child should be treated in a corridor, and has asked NHS England to draw up urgent standards and a plan

Somewhere in an integrated care board headquarters this autumn, a small emergency planning team is rehearsing winter surge arrangements for a population of more than a million people. The team is smaller than it was a year ago. Colleagues who once shared the load have taken redundancy or moved on. The plans still need sign-off, because the government has now confirmed that responsibility for emergency preparedness will stay with the board for at least another year. That confi

The NHS Federated Data Platform has crossed that threshold, yet the question occupying Whitehall is not how to extract more value from it but whether its foundations will hold.

Major London hospital trust launches operational pilot alongside emergency department expansion and rising doctor satisfaction scores

The government has backed the National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare in full, and the MHRA will begin testing continuous safety surveillance of AI-enabled devices

An £80m pilot of nine diagnostic tools aims to lift timely assessment from 60% to 92%, but its results will depend on workforce, data systems and treatment funding.

On a winter afternoon in almost any acute trust, a bed manager reads down a list of patients who are medically fit to leave. Most are elderly. Each is waiting for a care package, a placement or a home adaptation that nobody has yet arranged. Outside, an ambulance queue lengthens because the emergency department has nowhere to send its next admission. The bed manager knows the cause without consulting a dashboard. It sits in a social care system that the NHS cannot commission,

A weight management programme that reached 187% of its target points to a workable model for prevention, though the wider regional data shows how uneven delivery remains.