Daily digest April 21 2015

Labour to hire 1,000 extra nurses in first 100 days

Ed Miliband will say today that 1,000 extra nurses would be recruited in his first 100 days in office as part of an emergency plan to rescue the NHS.

The Labour leader will also pledge to launch a recruitment drive to halt the staffing crisis, and to fulfil promises to repeal the Health and Social Care Act, the Mirror reports.

Mr Miliband says that without urgent action the health service will ‘slide into crisis’.

He will tell students at Manchester Metropolitan University that Labour pledges to have 20,000 more nurses by 2020.

Read more on the Daily Mirror website: click here

Too many vitamins raise heart disease and cancer risk

Taking too many vitamin tablets can increase a person’s risk of heart disease and cancer, research shows.

Millions of Britons take vitamin supplements regularly in a bid to stay fit and healthy, but a decade-long study which examined the effect of supplements on thousands of people, found they can do ‘more harm than good’.

The Mail Online reports on a study by researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Centre, which warns that taking above the recommended daily amount of over-the-counter vitamins may increase the risk of developing cancer and heart disease by up to 20%.

Read more on the Daily Mail website: click here

Drugs in creams could help beat MS

Two drugs used in skin creams for treating athlete’s foot and eczema have been shown to reverse multiple sclerosis, according to a study reported by the Sun.

The discovery could lead to new therapies for treating the auto-immune disease, which affects around 100,000 people in the UK.

Scientists at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, US, found the anti-fungal agent miconazole and the steroid clobetasol both restored movement to mice paralysed by a rodent version of MS.

Read more on the Sun website: click here

NHS chiefs retire for 24 hours to access their pensions

NHS rules that have been ‘contrived’ to allow bosses to retire for a day and draw a pension before carrying on working as before must be overhauled, finance experts have warned.

Hospital chief executives have used the loophole to take hundreds of thousands of pounds tax-free while continuing to be paid large salaries.

NHS staff can start drawing a pension alongside a full-time job if they ‘retire’ for 24 hours and then do no more than 16 hours’ work a week for a month.

According to the Times, Hargreaves Lansdown head of pensions research Tom McPhail said the NHS 24-hour retirement ‘does look pretty contrived’ but followed increasingly common practice in the public sector.

(£) Read more on the Times website: click here