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A new CCG allocation formula, in defence of the Liverpool Care Pathway and the inevitable outcome of all those health scare stories…

A new CCG funding allocation formula is due to be finalised by NHS England today and could see almost £1bn diverted from England’s poorest areas to its richest, the Guardian reports.

The new formula will focus more on the age of a population and less on deprivation factors, the paper said - and estimates from the House of Commons library suggest the north of England will lose £721.6m and the capital £222m, while the south of England will gain £283.3m and the Midlands and the east some £660.2m.

The Telegraph quotes a consultant in palliative care who claims that the Liverpool Care Pathway was made a ‘scapegoat’ and that its demise was a ‘tragedy’.

Claud Regnard, a consultant at St Oswald’s Hospice in Newcastle, compared the scrapping of the pathway to banning the Highway Code because of bad drivers.

The Times reports a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine in which academics from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and University of Warwick declare ‘case closed’ on vitamin supplements.

One in three Britons take some form of vitamin or mineral pill, the Times reports - yet the academics concluded that the accumulation of evidence suggests ‘supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults… has no clear benefit and might even be harmful.’

However the Health Food Manufacturers’ Association argued that daily supplements are useful in some parts of the country where there are ‘pockets of low vitamin intake’, and claimed the pills ‘provide important nutritional insurance for millions of users’.

And finally, here at the Daily Digest we spend a lot of time covering health scare stories. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, according to the Independent, almost one in ten British adults wrongly believes that coffee causes cancer…