Pulse’s investigation into a botched NHS England list clearing drive, which found that at least 35,000 patients have been wrongly dropped, has made it onto the Telegraph front page, the Mail, and the Times.
The scheme, which targeted elderly patients and vulnerable groups in a bid to drive down GP funding, has seen patients struggling to obtain medicines and missed from health check-ups and cancer screening programmes.
Pulse found 14% of patients removed from lists had to subsequently reregister, as they were genuine patients, double the number estimated by NHS England last year.
Leading in the Metro, Guardian and Independent, the news that skin cancer hospital admissions have jumped by 41% in just five years, partly as a result of increased GP referrals.
Public Health England figures have said incidences of skin cancer are increasing, potentially due to increasing availability of cheap holiday escapes, but also due to Nice guidelines cutting the number of procedures that are performed out of hospital.
Johnathon Major of the British Association of Dermatologists commented: ‘As holidays to sunny locations become cheaper and tanned skin remains a desirable fashion statement, we have seen an inevitable increase in skin cancer incidence rates.’
And the Mail reports that it may be much easier than first thought for junk-food addicts can retrain their brain to crave healthy low-calorie foods through a controlled diet.
Research published in the journal of Nutrition and Diabetes conducted MRIs on 26 obese men and women and found that those put on the diet plan had greatly decreased sensitivity to junk food, and had reward receptors stimulated by healthy foods.
Previously it was thought that early conditioning to junk-food preference could be much harder to reverse, lead author Dr Thilo Deckersbach said: ‘We show here that it is possible to shift preferences from unhealthy food to healthy food without surgery,’
