Mind & body, in brief

England's health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has asked NHS England to draw up urgent plans to end corridor care for children. [2]

Corridor care is treatment given in a hospital corridor or other overflow space while a patient waits for a bed on a ward. [3][4]

Cooper also wants new standards for how children are treated in A&E, the hospital emergency department. [2]

The waiting figures do not show how many of the patients are children, and Cooper said they will be changed so that they do. [2]

More than a dozen health groups had urged her to act before she spoke on the BBC on Sunday. [2]

She also announced £140m for 14 urgent care schemes in England, including new urgent care centres, ambulances and upgrades to A&E departments. [1]

In September, 50,582 people in England waited more than 12 hours in A&E between a decision to admit them and getting a bed. [3]

That was up from 44,951 in August, and the Society for Acute Medicine counted it as 1,686 people a day. [3]

Almost 7.3 million people went to A&E in England between June and August, the most for any summer on record. [2]

NHS England's medical director, Frankie Swords, said flu admissions were the highest she could remember for the time of year. [1]

The Royal College of Nursing, the nurses' union, called the money "just another sticking plaster" because nurses are already short. [1]

The shadow health secretary, Damian Hinds, asked the UK government to say where the money is coming from. [2]

Why it matters. Watch for NHS England's plan for children, and for the first figures that count children in the 12-hour waits; they will show whether the £140m changes this winter. [2]

Hospital doctors in Northern Ireland will strike on Friday 20 November, and senior doctors will run a reduced service the Monday after. [5] Northern Ireland's government, called the Executive, is seven months into its financial year with no budget. [5] Without one, Northern Ireland's health minister cannot pay the 3.5% rise an independent body recommended. [5] The UK government has offered £525m this year, and its finance minister says this year's spending pressures are about £1.6bn. [5] The nurses' union has opened a strike vote too. [5]

Why it matters. Patients in Northern Ireland face a doctors' strike in November unless the parties agree a budget first. [5] It is a second winter strain on a UK health service, next to England's corridor waits.

Nottingham University Hospitals has now sacked 15 staff for looking at the medical records of victims of the 2023 Nottingham attacks, up from 11 in May. [6][7] Valdo Calocane killed two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates, 65, in June 2023. [6] The trust also gave 15 final written warnings. [7] It has told the nurses' and doctors' regulators, the data watchdog and the police, and is testing a system that flags suspicious record access. [7]

Why it matters. The families learned of a further breach of their privacy, on top of their loss. [6] The head of NHS England has said staff suspected of snooping will now be suspended at once. [6]

At least 16 NHS trusts and health boards in England say they do not use the £330m data platform run by Palantir, a US data company. [8] The answers came from freedom of information requests gathered by Medact, a campaign group that opposes the deal. [8] Greater Manchester called the system "duplicative". [8] Palantir says trusts using it carried out 117,000 extra operations, but NHS England says those figures cannot show cause. [8] The UK government must soon decide whether to end the seven-year contract early. [8]

Why it matters. The choice decides which company runs the system meant to join up patient data across England's hospitals, and whether £330m bought something they use. [8] More than 44,000 people have formally objected to their data going into it. [8]

An undercover Guardian reporter spent a day at a five-day retreat in Cheshire, England, run by Barbara O'Neill, an Australian promoter of natural remedies. [9] Tickets cost up to £1,300. [9] Australian authorities banned her from giving any health services in 2019. [9] She told a woman with lupus to "keep away from the doctor" and told a woman with diabetes to stop testing her blood sugar. [9] She has 3.6 million Instagram followers. [9]

Why it matters. Doctors told the Guardian that following some of her advice could kill. [9] Some people at the event said they had lost trust in medicine after side effects or failed treatment. [9]

Most US hospitals offer free or cheaper care, called charity care, to patients on low incomes. [23] A study of 166 nonprofit hospitals in Texas found 44% say they will bill patients before checking if they qualify. [11] Only 10 promise a full refund to people who paid and later qualified. [11] One house cleaner paid $5,500 to book surgery, then qualified, and did not get it back. [10] Los Angeles County has helped set up a system that will let every hospital there screen patients for aid easily. [12]

Why it matters. Help that exists on paper can be missed when the forms are hard, which leaves low-income patients in debt. [23] About 100 million US adults have some health care debt. [12]

Families of patients sleep on the pavement outside AIIMS, one of Delhi's best-known public hospitals, and Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, NPR reported. [13] AIIMS pays part of the cost of treatment for poor families, so many travel hundreds of miles to get care there. [13] But many cannot pay for a room for the weeks or months the treatment takes. [13] One couple from Bihar, more than 600 miles away, sleep in shifts so they do not miss a call about their six-year-old son, who has leukaemia. [13]

Why it matters. Cheaper treatment helps these families, and they still pay for it in nights outside and in travel costs. [13] AIIMS did not answer NPR's questions about where families should stay. [13]

Women who wore noise-blocking ear defenders during keyhole surgery felt sick or vomited less often afterwards, a trial in China found. [14] Among 192 patients at a hospital in Suzhou, 35% of those wearing them had nausea or vomiting within two days, against 52% without. [14] All of them had standard anaesthesia and anti-sickness medicine. [14] The operating theatres averaged 66 decibels, about as loud as a normal conversation. [14] The results were presented at a meeting of anaesthesia doctors in San Diego. [14]

Why it matters. It suggests the brain keeps processing sound under general anaesthesia, when a patient is fully unconscious. [14] The team says why it works is still a guess, and wants a bigger trial. [14]

An Aboriginal woman held in prison was shackled to a hospital bed in Queensland, Australia, while she was in labour last weekend, said Sisters Inside, an advocacy group. [15] She gave birth to a premature baby by caesarean, and the shackles were removed on Friday. [15] Days after the birth, Labor and the Coalition, Australia's two main political sides, blocked Senator Lidia Thorpe's bill to ban shackling women in childbirth. [15] Queensland's prison service says it will review the case. [15]

Why it matters. United Nations rules Australia has signed say restraints must never be used on women during labour or birth. [15] Hospital staff had tried and failed to get the shackles taken off. [15]

Trained volunteers working for Earthwatch Europe, an environmental charity, found metals at possibly harmful levels at 52 freshwater sites in Corby, a town in central England. [16] Soil near old waste sites held cadmium and arsenic at levels that could affect human health, the group says. [16] Children in Corby were born with birth defects believed to be linked to the demolition of its steelworks in the 1980s. [16] In 2009 a court found the town's council negligent in handling that waste. [16]

Why it matters. A mother who has campaigned for 30 years hopes people will now listen. [16] The Environment Agency, which polices pollution in England, says its own tests do not show widespread harm. [16]

Nearly one in three adults in Pakistan has a mental or behavioural disorder that could be diagnosed, the country's first national survey of mental health found. [17] Nearly 18,000 adults in all four provinces took part between 2018 and 2022. [17] One in five met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, and more than one in ten had depression. [17] Six per cent said they had thought about suicide in the past month. [17] Rates were higher among poorer, less educated and unemployed people. [17]

Why it matters. Until now planners relied on small local studies and outside guesses. [17] Pakistan's psychiatrists' society says the country is short of trained mental health workers to treat them. [17]

In mice, alcohol made microglia, the brain's own immune cells, break down the mesh of molecules that supports brain cells, a study in the journal Immunity found. [18] The cells changed shape within about an hour of a dose. [18] Mice whose microglia lacked a protein called MyD88 had less brain damage from alcohol. [18] Brain tissue from six people who had died with alcohol use disorder showed signs of the same mesh damage. [18] Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in the US led the work. [18]

Why it matters. This is a mouse study, so it does not show the same thing happens in people who drink. [18] It points to a target that future drugs might aim at. [18]

About 1.05 million people in England, 1.7% of 62.5 million, have at least one of 406 rare diseases, a study of NHS records published in Scientific Reports found. [19] How common each disease is differs a lot between ethnic groups. [19] Some differences are hidden when groups are lumped together. [19] A skin form of lupus was much more common in Black Caribbean people but not in Black African people. [19] People with a rare disease were more likely to have a recorded Covid infection, 32.8% against 29.0%. [19]

Why it matters. The authors say the map can help doctors diagnose rare diseases earlier in the groups most affected. [19] A broad label such as "Black" can hide which group needs the help. [19]

In critical care units at one large referral hospital in northern Ghana, nurses reported leaving routine care undone, a survey of 217 nurses found. [20] The tasks most often missed were team meetings about patients (75.6%), helping patients walk (70.0%) and mouth care (62.2%). [20] Nurses in A&E and the pregnancy emergency unit missed more than those on a high-dependency ward. [20] Nurses with supportive managers missed less. [20] The survey was taken at one time, so it cannot show what causes the missed care. [20]

Why it matters. The study's authors call these essential tasks, and they are what gets dropped under pressure. [20] Missed care is a patient safety risk, they say. [20]

Somalia has nine laboratories that can study tissue under a microscope to diagnose cancer, up from one in 2015, a study found. [21] Fourteen pathologists, the doctors who do that work, handle 25,000 to 30,000 samples a year. [21] Only one lab can run the stain tests that tell cancer types apart, and none can run gene tests. [21] Somalia has been through conflict and instability since 1991. [21] In 2024 Somalia's Banadir region set up a cancer register based on lab results. [21]

Why it matters. Without these tests many Somali cancers are diagnosed late or wrongly. [21] The register is a start on counting cancer cases across the country. [21]

US overdose deaths fell from about 110,000 at their 2022 peak to about 70,000 last year, the BBC reported from Ohio and Illinois. [22] Naloxone, a nasal spray that reverses opioid overdoses, helped bring the number down. [22] But street fentanyl is now often mixed with animal sedatives that naloxone does not reverse. [22] In Franklin County, Ohio, 78% of fatal overdoses in the past year involved stimulants such as crack, often laced with fentanyl, a local recovery group said. [22]

Why it matters. People who think they are buying crack get other drugs mixed in, and overdose without knowing what they took. [22] A Chicago jail now scans all post after inmates died from paper soaked in synthetic cannabis. [22]