The commentators                    19-05-15

...on the health service

Junior doctors still leave medical school – as I did – ill-equipped to care for the dying. Medical students receive on average 20 hours of palliative care education in a 5 year medical curriculum. We teach students anatomy, physiology, pharmacology; hearts, brains, livers; reverse, cure, fix. We focus so much on the saving of lives that we forget to tell students what to do when lives are un-saveable, producing doctors for whom death means failure. This is a big problem because death is not a rare event for a junior doctor.
- Katherine Sleeman, the Independent
It is hard to find anyone familiar with the day-to-day reality in the NHS who thinks £22bn a year can be saved by 2021 without a major loss of coverage and quality. Meanwhile, George Osborne proposes to cut welfare spending by £12bn a year, implying a predictable increase in demands on health services. It is hard to avoid the impression that Cameron’s speech, whatever its intended political aim, lacks a serious basis in policymaking.
- Colin Leys, The Guardian
Zoe Williams
The Conservatives must begin a proper debate on how best to finance the NHS in the long term. This would take courage, but with Labour’s credibility in tatters, this is the perfect time to start one - if necessary on an all-party basis and preferably before the health service reaches its 70th birthday in 2018. If we want the NHS to prosper for another 70 years, then we need to work out how to pay for it.
- Philip Johnston, Daily Telegraph
The big problem with the health service is not lack of money, but how it's spent. We keep hearing how frontline services are in crisis, but there never seems to be any shortage of dosh for fancy non-jobs like chairman (sorry, chair) of Clinical Board, Primary Care Transformation, NHS England, etc, and Director of Primary Care for the National Clinical Governance Team, which come with six-figure salaries nailed on.
- Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail
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Comment archive, 2015

Ed Miliband
March 27 Prince Charles's letters
March 26 UK politics
March 25 Cameron's exit strategy
March 24 Lee Kwan Yew
March 23 UK politics
Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour party conference
March 13 UK politics
March 12 Jeremy Clarkson
March 11 UK politics
March 10 UK politics
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Rifkind and Straw
February 27 UK politics
February 26 Minor party leaders
February 25 Natalie Bennett
February 24 Rifkind and Straw
February 23 World affairs
Merkel and Putin
February 13 UK politics
February 12 UK politics
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February 9 Politics
Alexis Tsipras
January 30 Rape law
January 29 UK politics
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January 27 Greece
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Hebdo demo
January 16 World politics
January 15 Election debates
January 14 Charlie Hebdo
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George Osborne
March 20 UK politics
March 19 The Budget
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Boris Nemtsov
March 6 Scotland and the election
March 5 Isis
March 4 UK politics
March 3 Radicalisation
March 2 Russia
Copenhagen
February 20 UK politics
February 19 Chelsea and racism
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February 16 Copenhagen 
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February 6 UK politics
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Pope Francis
January 23 UK politics
January 22 Chilcot inquiry
January 21 Page Three
January 20 Anti-semitism 
January 19 Religion and freedom
Charb
January 9 Charlie Hebdo
January 8 Charlie Hebdo
January 7 UK politics
January 6 UK politics
January 5 UK politics
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New Tory MPs
May 15
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Depression and killer pilot
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