United Kingdom - Thérèse Coffey appointed Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Sept 2022

Ministerial Appointments: September 2022
"The Rt Hon Dr Thérèse Coffey MP as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. She will also be Deputy Prime Minister"

In the light of this there may be certain attitude changes at the Dept Health and Social Care now that Sajid Javid has been replaced:

Yes this really is our new senior politician in charge of the Nation's health

 

I am hopefully the process will continue and wont get axed and becomes really effective before any damage is done.

 

Patients are going to have a fie1d day if any hea1th professiona1 or their GP start discussing the need for a 'hea1thy 1ifesty1e' with them...

 

Yes I don't think there's any definitive reason to think that the gains that have been made will be lost - just that there's unlikely to be the enthusiasm from the top that was there with Javid.

 

Just read that the Dr for Dr Coffey is Doctorate in Chemistry at UCL - whether that has any relevance re ME/CFS science happening currently or already done would be interesting to know?

The title is: Structural and reactivity studies of bis(imido) complexes of molybdenum(VI)
link: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.286225

I'm not posting this assuming it is directly related - more that I'm aware chemistry is a big subject and a PhD is always v specific (this doesn't specifically strike me as necessarily on the 'bio' end given it is about structure of crystalsetc), so wondering whether the 'broad area' would mean a tenacity for reading/understanding any of the research coming through and its relevance better than those without?

 

This post has been copied from this thread where Coffey's previous role at the Department for Work and Pensions is discussed.
United Kingdom: MPs ask Coffey why she is hiding nine secret DWP reports

As one of our local MPs' I suggest, with her local contempt for constituents, arrogance and her reputation, forget Savid J and DHSC....I believe NHS England are just going through the motions before dropping ME like a stone.

 

Given that she left her first degree at Oxford after failing exams due to lack of application, there might be some doubts about the tenacity even if the ability is there!

Most people who go on to work in other areas quickly leave their degree subjects behind anyway. My career was in small-scale touring theatre, and off the top of my head I can name at least two artists with chemistry degrees among those I became friends with. I doubt either would find it easy to read and assess a current research paper—it'd be like trying to remember the French you passed your exams in but haven't spoken since.

 

The idea of an ex-work and pensions minister then becoming health minister does not sound good to me.

 

I disagree from what I have witnessed to date.....

 

she studied inorganic chemistry and nothing to do with bio sciences. I was at UCL doing chemistry at the same time as her and she was the year above me so I had her as a demonstrator in our lab classes. I was also on department committees with her.

 

From my fo11owing of the DWP and benefits, I agree that it doesn't bode we11 for PWME. Short artic1e on Coffey's history at the DWP and the new DWP minister here -

https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/coffey-replaced-by-smith-at-dwp

 

There's a big difference between how an MP can behave at the Constituency level were there is no statutory influence on how they conduct themselves, and how they operate as a senior Cabinet Minister.

Certainly in general terms Coffey's conduct at the Department of Work and Pensions gives rise to serious concerns about future openness at the Dept of Health and Social Care, but I think it would take a lot of personal animus on her part to single out ME/CFS for negative attention in her current role, and I just don't think given all the other pressures that the DHSC faces that she will have the available attention to swat the ME/CFS fly even if she has a personal inclination to do that.

This Parliament is past the half way point and has only just over two years before the next General Election, the Government is going to be increasingly concerned about its polling and its difficult to see why the DHSC would court potentially negative publicity over ME/CFS when there's no obvious gain other than perhaps playing to a very small part of the electorate. I don't expect Coffey to follow Javid's lead on ME/CFS but I can't see that she would want to put effort into creating a spoiler for what Javid started.

 

But in actual fact all SJ has done has started a conversation.
The only way to effect any change is to challenge within NHS England's internal processes.
Either at National or regional level. NHS E is in effect a Strategic Health Authority...eat your heart out Andrew Landsley...

I have been going through their declarations of more recent times.
There is currently nothing in their programmes to identify ME.
Not in 5 year plan; nor Long Term Conditions; nor specialised services nor Health Inequalities.
ICS now have cash flow issues so no spare cash there.
We are fighting to retain what we had in the CCG framework. And that finance had been built on through identified dire needs over 30 _40 years duration by one caring compassionate and interested consultant haematology Dr Terry Mitchell, Lowestoft Paget Hospital.
It was maintained when attacked in 2005 by a patient partnership with Terry.
And we have been fighting hard ever since.....
This will not end well I fear BUT, I would love to be proved wrong.!

 

"New secretary of state ways of working preferences”

New regime at the Dept of H&SC has identified the real priorities:

"An email, understood to have been sent to staff at the Department of Health and Social Care and sent on to workers at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), is reported to have told them to told to avoid using “Oxford commas” – the final comma used in a list of things."

 

That's silly, useless, and unnecessary.

 

There's a UK cultural context which is difficult to translate. In the past this would have been an "endearing piece of British eccentricity" - something over which we UKers* would have laughed at ourselves and incorporated into habitual self deprecation - all very jolly. However many of the certainties that underlay that culture have evaporated in recent decades and in the face of a health crisis, cost living crisis and huge economic uncertainty, such 'eccentricity' isn't just tone deaf, it's a profound insult from Government to voters - it sets fatuous 'style' over the delivery of desperately needed services.

This forum rightly limits how we deal with politics so I won't go any further, but this is an issue which can be understood as a matter of culture, and not of Party politics.

*One of the disappearing certainties is the whole notion of Britishness - with devolution and aspiration of nationhood in one or more parts of the UK there isn't a country legally called Britain - only the (ironically) United Kingdom, there is "Great Britain" which is the UK excluding Northern Ireland, so the term "Brit" is no longer inclusive - UKer seems the only collective noun now available.

 

If I understand this correctly, an email like this might have been seen a kind British of tongue-in-cheek humor in good times, but right now, it's tone-deaf, as Britain is in the middle of multiple crises. Agreed, now's a terrible time to tell your employees how to do grammar. The letter is unnecessary because it's nitpicking. But the reason I phrased my comment the way I did...was to use an Oxford comma!

I like the Oxford comma, personally.