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Burgers, monkeys and the plan that ‘might just save the NHS’

The newspapers this morning are filled with the political fallout of the report released yesterday on hospitals with high mortality rates. The Guardian leads on a BMA statement that attacks the Government for trying to make ‘political capital’ out of patient deaths in the NHS.

The Telegraph, meanwhile, has an interesting piece that suggests the whole thing was dreamt up by Jeremy Hunt to destroy his counterpart on the opposition benches, Andy Burnham. Quite how he arranged for such appalling care in hospitals over the past ten years is not explained, but it argues that Mr Burnham’s idea about fully integrating health and social care is the ‘idea which might just save the health service’.

Moving away from Keogh, the Daily Mail carries a story that suggests the coalition Government has broken another promise. The number of animal experiments carried out in the UK topped four million last year with a sharp increase in the number of monkeys used in laboratories. This 8% jump came despite the coalition pledging in its programme for government to ‘work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research’. Oh dear.

And finally, back at the Guardian, we have the shock revelation that children’s menus at the UK’s leading restaurant and pub chains are often ‘unhealthy and unimaginative’, and are ‘dominated by nuggets, burgers, sausages, ready meals and fizzy drinks, with little fresh fruit or vegetables on offer’. That would be the same as the adult menus then…