French voters return to the polls this weekend for the second round of voting in the country’s legislative elections. 577 National Assembly seats are being contested.
As the UK’s political parties enter the final straight for next Thursday’s general election, the outcome is all but certain, with polling strongly indicating that the Labour Party is set to return to power for the first time since 2010 — at current projections with the largest parliamentary majority in British history.
The Council of the European Union’s (European Council) Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO) convened on Friday to discuss critical aspects of EU health policy, investment in the healthcare sector, pharmaceutical reforms, workforce challenges, and health data utilisation.
In 2023, global temperatures soared to ~1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, making it the hottest year on record. As we enter mid-2024, extreme heat persists, with several Asian countries facing prolonged periods above 40°C.
The newly-formed far-right Dutch coalition government of the PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB parties this month laid out its agreed policy programme in the document ‘Hoop, Lef en Trots’ (‘Hope, Courage and Pride’). While the agreement expresses the new government’s intention to improve healthcare accessibility and make the sector more attractive for workers, it also outlines substantial budget cuts that have raised concerns among healthcare industry groups.
Two weeks ago Germany’s cabinet government approved Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s hospital reform. The current watered-down reform’s key feature is a proposal to move the sector’s reimbursement model away from fee-per-service payments, purportedly to reduce the incentive to overtreat. However, experts tell us the real motivation is still to shut down smaller unspecialised hospitals. Will it succeed in doing so?
The UK Labour Party this week unveiled its latest election pledge — to clear the NHS backlog of patients waiting over 18 weeks for treatment within the first term of a Labour government. The party expects this to involve making greater use of the private sector.
Last week we reported on the UK government’s plan to increase the options available to NHS England patients for certain types of out-of-hospital care, in what it hailed as “the largest expansion of patient choice in the NHS in a decade”.
The UK government has launched a consultation proposing that new dental graduates either work in the NHS for a set period after qualifying or be faced with repaying a large proportion of their training costs.
The UK this week reported that people on long-term sick leave or classed as economically inactive has risen to 2.8 million, up 300,000 on the previous year. This statistic came fast on the heels of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s latest controversial speech calling for an end to the UK’s ‘sick note culture’ in a call to strip GPs of their power to sign people off work.
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