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NHS trusts overspent by £770m last year in the latest sign that hospitals are finding it impossible to meet fast-rising demand for care while their finances are facing an unprecedented squeeze. That total is £190m more than the £580m maximum that health service bosses had sought from England’s 236 NHS trusts in 2016-17.
The £770m has emerged from analysis of the trusts’ own official figures showing their financial performance in 2016-17 obtained by the Health Service Journal. Its publication sparked a fresh debate about whether the government is giving the NHS enough money to do its job properly.
About 100 of England’s 235 acute, mental health, community services and ambulance trusts ended the year in the red and dozens more only escaped recording a deficit through one-off savings or technical accounting measures, HSJ found.
Read more: NHS trusts overspend by £770m despite bailout funding
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Earlier this year, artificial intelligence scientist Sebastian Thrun and colleagues at Stanford University demonstrated that a “deep learning” algorithm was capable of diagnosing potentially cancerous skin lesions as accurately as a board-certified dermatologist.
The cancer finding, reported in Nature, was part of a stream of reports this year offering an early glimpse into what could be a new era of “diagnosis by software,” in which artificial intelligence aids doctors, or even competes with them.
Experts say medical images, like photographs, x-rays, and MRIs, are a nearly perfect match for the strengths of deep-learning software, which has in the past few years led to breakthroughs in recognizing faces and objects in pictures.
Read more: New algorithms are able to diagnose disease as accurately as expert physicians.
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Workplace exposure to very low frequency electromagnetic fields may be linked to a doubling in risk of developing the most common form of motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS for short, suggests research published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
Previous research has suggested that ALS might be linked to workplace exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields, electric shocks, solvents, metals, and pesticides, but flaws in the design of these studies undermined their findings.
This latest study relied on data from the Netherlands Cohort Study, which has been looking at diet and cancer. It involves more than 58,000 men and more than 62,000 women aged between 55 and 69, and began in 1986.
Read more: Low frequency electromagnetic fields linked to motor neurone disease
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Praise for the police and NHS staff has poured in on social media with people posting messages of solidarity and using the hashtag #WeAreNotAfraid.
In the wake of the London attack many people have been quick to praise the bravery of the city's "heroes" - the emergency services and members of the public who rushed to help those in need.
Doctors and nurses were seen running from nearby St Thomas' Hospital to help those injured on Westminster Bridge while MP Tobias Ellwood was pictured giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to PC Keith Palmer, the officer stabbed by the attacker.
Another of those quickly on the scene outside Parliament was Dr Jeeves Wijesuriya, chairman of the junior doctors' committee at the British Medical Association, who had been talking to a regional BBC team when the events began to unfold.
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Researcher Dr. Luan and his interdisciplinary team from the University of Texas at Austin have developed an ultra flexible nanoelectronic thread (NET) that has the potential to offer a new type of the long-term neural implants.
(A and B) As-fabricated NET-50 and NET-10 probes on substrates.
(C and D) Zoom-in views of two electrodes as marked by the dashed boxes in (A) and (B), respectively.
(G) A NET-50 probe suspended in water.
A knot is made with a curvature of less than 50 μm to illustrate its flexibility and robustness.
(H) Multiple NET-10 probes suspended in water.
Scale bars, 100 μm (A), 50 μm (B, G, and H), and 10 μm (C and D).
Read more: Nanoelectronic Thread Enables Scientists to Extend Length of Brain Implant Efficacy
