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The latest Health Survey for England (published December 2018) found that the overwhelming majority of adults are so unhealthy they are actually putting their lives at risk. The survey questioned 8,000 adults and 2,000 children about a variety of topics including obesity, smoking and drinking.

Despite Government warnings about the risks of obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, waistlines continue to expand. Just over a quarter of adults are now classed as clinically obese and, according to a House of Commons briefing paper, one in 10 children is obese by the age of five years, rising to one in five by the age of 11 years.

A landmark report on the state of ageing in Britain has warned that a significant proportion of people are at risk of spending later life in poverty, ill-health and hardship.

Britain is undergoing a radical demographic shift, with the number of people aged 65 and over set to grow by more than 40% in two decades, reaching more than 17 million by 2036. The number of households where the oldest person is 85 or over is increasing faster than any other age group.

According to the chair of the RCGP, GPs are fighting a losing battle when it comes to delivering full patient satisfaction
Results of this year’s British Social Attitudes survey, released last week, show that satisfaction with GP services is the lowest it has been since the survey – began 36 years ago. Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of GPs, has responded with disappointment.

She said: “GPs and our teams want to provide the best care that we possibly can for our patients, so it’s always disappointing to hear that some people are not always satisfied with the services they are receiving.

“We know that general practice is currently facing intense resource and workforce pressures, and while GPs are working incredibly hard to combat these, we understand that many patients are still waiting too long to see their doctor – something we find just as frustrating.

Trying to get the balance right between pessimism about the real problems and due optimism about the achievements of parts of the health service matters, says Andy Cowper

One of my favourite NHS observers is Julian Patterson of NHS Networks. His weekly blogs are a source of satirical comfort to many about the madness that so often passes for management, ranging from the hilarious to the horrific.

They are consistently very, very funny. 

Needless to say, I have shamelessly nicked quite a few of his jokes. Julian is a lot funnier than I am: I need all the help I can beg, borrow or steal.

Experts have called on the government to make story time an intrinsic part of the school day for children right up to their teens, after two major new pieces of research revealed a decline in both the number of children being read to daily and the number reading for pleasure by themselves.

The findings of Nielsen Book Research’s annual survey into the reading habits of British children, to be revealed on Tuesday at an industry conference, show that only 32% of British children under 13 are read to daily by an adult, for pleasure, down four percentage points on the previous year, and nine percentage points down on 2012.

It was like coming up for air. When Queer As Folk was first televised, 20 years ago, I was a closeted 14-year-old who was, frankly, desperate not to be gay. Life is hassle enough, I thought. Any thoughts of same-sex attraction were met with an oh-God-please-not-this panic. A vision of a supposedly normal future life – wife, kids – was being snatched away, with no clear desirable alternative. Being gay seemed to me to be a mishmash of the threat of Aids, not being “a man”, dying alone, and a lifetime of misery and rejection.

I grew up in the centre of Stockport, and Queer As Folk was set just seven miles away, on Canal Street (“Anal Street”, my peers would snigger), the heart of Manchester’s LGBT community. It may as well have been a different universe: I lived in a suffocatingly laddish, heterosexual world (the Facebook wall of one of my then best friends is today rife with Tommy Robinson videos) full of jibes about being gay – taunts I would indulge, in order to fit in. It wasn’t for another six years, after a silent unrequited love for an evangelical Christian and several relationships with girls, that I came out.

Sociologists Daniel Laurison (pictured) and Sam Friedman spent five years on their innovative study which involved statistical analysis and immersing themselves in modern workplaces.

Rising BME support for Labour and diversity in Tory seats could be pivotal

How happy are people in the United Kingdom? How satisfied are they with their lives? These questions and others are central to the well-being agenda that has been growing in prominence in economic and wider policy circles since the turn of the century.

This paper, the first time the Resolution Foundation has published detailed analysis of subjective well-being, takes a wide-ranging look at what well-being data has to offer by way of lessons for economic policymakers concerned with raising the nation’s living standards.

Older adults who watch more than three and a half hours of television a day experienced greater memory decline than those who watched less, according to an analysis published online in Scientific Reports on February 28.

Slap bang in the middle of this week falls one parliamentary event likely to be greeted with near-silence. When Philip Hammond stands up tomorrow afternoon to deliver his spring statement on the health of Britain’s finances, he’ll know in his bones that it will provoke no feverish excitement among lobby journalists, nor command the front pages. Given a major economic policy announcement, newsreaders would previously devote their bulletins to his figures and forecasts; this time they will probably give it a mere moment’s notice. And who can blame them?

A prime minister potentially faces her last days in office, her cabinet is in all-out mutiny and the country teeters on the brink of its biggest foreign policy decision in almost half a century. Herein lies a glorious chance to treat politics as Netflix, to gossip about court intrigues among Boris and Amber and Jacob, to refer in am-dram tones to Cox’s codpiece and the Malthouse compromise. Presented with all that, which puritan would plump instead for Spreadsheet Phil and his dry-bread sums?

DOCTORS and nurses in our hospitals are forced to work beyond their working hours without pay as the staffing and recruitment crisis continues to take its toll.

According to the NHS Staff Survey 2018, the majority of respondents (62 per cent) at Oxford University Hospitals OUH said they work unpaid extra hours, while hundreds admitted that work-related stress had made them ill.

And worryingly for trust bosses, just a quarter of staff felt that OUH took positive action on the mental health and wellbeing of its staff.

The findings are yet more evidence that local workers at the county's understaffed hospitals continue to be pushed to the limit.

Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest level for a decade despite Theresa May’s £20.5bn-a-year funding boost and the enthusiasm created by the service’s 70th birthday.

Barely half of people surveyed (53%) are happy with how the NHS is run, the lowest percentage since 2007. It is 16 percentage points lower than in 2010, when the coalition government’s austerity programme began.

Teenagers in Britain may be putting their health and education at risk by spending too much time on social media at bedtime, according to a major study into adolescent sleep habits.

More than a third of teenagers spent at least three hours a day on social media, with a fifth devoting at least five hours to the activity, researchers found. Those who were on social media for three hours or more daily were most likely to get to sleep late.

Going to sleep late on school nights was a particular concern, researchers said, because it put teenagers at risk of “poorer academic and emotional outcomes”. Insufficient sleep in adolescence has been linked to a range of mental health problems, obesity and poor performance at school.

The government is to introduce an official measure of how often low-income families across the UK skip meals or go hungry because they cannot afford to buy enough food, the Guardian can reveal.

A national index of food insecurity is to be incorporated into an established UK-wide annual survey run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that monitors household incomes and living standards.

The proportion of income spent on rent in the private rented sector has fallen from 35.4 per cent in 2010/11 to 32.9 per cent in 2017/18. 

Including income from housing benefit, over the same period the amount of income used for rent by social tenants increased from 26.7 per cent to 28 per cent.

The figures from the English Housing Survey for 2017/18, highlighted by the Residential Landlords Association, show that over the ten years between 2008/09 and 2017/18, average weekly rents across England (excluding London) in the private rented sector increased by 22 per cent, nearly half the increase of 43 per cent in rent in social housing sector. In London, private rents increased by an average of 34 per cent compared to 55 per cent in the social sector.

Like most students heading off to university, Emily Proctor, 19, felt apprehensive. But it wasn’t just the thought of leaving her family and making new friends that caused her to be anxious; Proctor was concerned about how she’d fit in as a teetotal student.

“I was worried as I knew that much of university life involves going out drinking, especially in the first year,” explains Proctor, who is studying law at Swansea University. To help alleviate her concerns, she signed up for the university’s alcohol-free accommodation. “I didn’t want to be around people who were partying constantly and coming home drunk,” she says. “I wanted to be around similar people who I could chill with instead of going out every night.” Proctor, who doesn’t drink alcohol as it’s never appealed to her, says that decision has proven to be a wise choice. “It worked out well in the end as I have friends that I stay in with and we might play cards, or go to the cinema or out for meals.”