blogs

Putting faith in global healthcare
I have long argued on this blog that there needs to be a greater engagement with faith based…

The BMA: A trade union with integrity?
Can the British Medical Association (BMA) be trusted to ‘maintain the honour and interests of the medical…

Abortion and preterm births: what women need to know but are not told
Prematurity - a birth prior to 37 weeks gestational age – has recently been described as: ‘the…

Candour in the NHS: Speaking the truth in love?
We would all want a good degree of honesty from anyone caring for us or treating us for a medical condition. …

Nurses caught up in immigration battle
The annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing opened on Sunday, and it began with a warning. …

Morning-after pill is now available to all girls UNDER the age of consent
News that the morning-after pill, ellaOne (which can be effective up to five days after sex), is now…

Elisabeth Elliot enters ‘the gates of splendor’
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” ― Jim…

How safe is the school cancer vaccination for young girls?
New reports (including on the front page of the Independent) are adding to the evolving story…

The new ethical frontier: DIY eugenics
The single most controversial development in biology in 2015 is a relatively cheap, easily manipulated…

Scottish Assisted Suicide Bill gets short shrift from MSPs
Patrick Harvie’s Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill has been defeated today in a free vote by 82 votes…

Thirteen ‘solutions’ to mitochondrial disease assessed
Mitochondrial disorders are passed on through a mother’s mitochondrial DNA. They are progressive…
Walk75 | Prayer Walk for Health
This year, we celebrate 75 years since the Christian Medical Fellowship came into being. Over that time, God has done some amazing things through Christian medics, nurses, midwives, and others coming together to pray, study God’s word, serve and encourage one another, and share the good news of Jesus. In the UK and worldwide, we […]
McArthur ‘Assisted Dying’ Bill announced
On 29 March 2024, Liam McArthur, MSP, announced his ‘Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill’ to the Scottish Parliament. This will now be debated and scrutinised by the Parliament. If passed, it would mean the legalisation of doctor-assisted suicide for those with an advanced illness who choose it, within the Scottish NHS. The […]
A confluence of evils
There are times when you see a confluence of evils merging from afar, but they merge so slowly that most people remain totally unaware of them, or if they are they just shrug their shoulders and move on. I first wrote about my concerns over organ donation from those requesting euthanasia (ODfE) in 2017 when Belgium […]
Midwifery in the headlines
Midwifery was in the news for all the wrong reasons at the end of last year. As a midwife of ten years, I was heartbroken to read headlines from The Times that said: ‘Midwives “toxic” working conditions putting babies’ lives at risk, report finds‘ and The Telegraph that said: “Russian roulette’ maternity units risk lives […]
Striking the right balance
how can Christian medics decide about industrial action? Until a decade ago, I was a medic struggling through the NHS quagmire. So, when I had the opportunity to join the CMF Junior Doctors Conference back in November 2023, I prepared myself to meet lots of doctors now near drowning in the thickening muck. In the […]
Want to change the future?
Having grown up in a TV family, I particularly loved movies that fostered the imagination, especially time travel. To be able to change what could have been or what might be, was the stuff of childhood dreams. What would you change if you could time travel? Suppose you could jump in a time machine, and […]
The ‘Letby effect’ on this paediatric nurse
Firstly, let me say that I cannot even begin to imagine the grief the families involved in this case must have gone through these last eight years and are still going through. The atrocities committed by Lucy Letby are chilling and deeply distressing. Honestly, it doesn’t seem enough to say that my ‘thoughts and prayers’ […]
The UK’s first womb transplant – what the media missed out
The first UK ‘womb transplant’, carried out by Richard Smith’s team in Oxford and announced at the end of August, understandably gained a lot of press coverage and was heralded by some as the ‘dawn of a new era’. In fact, the first uterus transplant was carried out in 2000 in Saudi Arabia in a […]
Lucy Letby – a warning for NHS culture
The tragic loss of life and heartache caused by Lucy Letby is beyond imagination. Our hearts go out to all those affected. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made that look even worse with the power and accuracy of the ‘retrospectoscope’. Patient safety was not put first, nor was the dogged pursuit of the truth of what happened […]
Lucy Letby- a deep grief
This is such a deeply disturbing case. One of the most horrifying scandals to ever hit the NHS. A neonatal nurse killed seven babies and attempted to murder six more. The perpetrator being a nurse is causing our nurse and midwife members, and us in the CMF Nurses & Midwives team, real grief. First, we’d […]
Doctors on strike – reflections of a conflicted consultant
On 1 August 1983, my life changed forever. I started work in the NHS. I lost all that I had known of normal life and have spent the last 40 years working in a broken system. I am in no doubt it needs fixing. Navigating endless demands with inadequate resources has been costly. From the […]
Complete societal capture on abortion
The sentencing of a woman for two years imprisonment for performing a home abortion with pills obtained via a phone consultation raises lots of questions. However, the main question asked in an almost universal chorus of headlines was why are our ‘archaic’ and ‘unfair’ abortion laws still in place? ‘A woman has been jailed for […]