💥💥 Tonight! 💥💥 Please join me, @drkathrynmannix.bsky.social & Sarah Perry online at 7pm discussing April's @hayfestival.bsky.social book club choice, Paul Kalanithi's wonderful "When Breath Becomes Air". Sign up is free 💙📚🩺

🧵/ The NHS is about to undergo one of the most radical – and scandalous - changes in its history. From 1st April (the public are the fools in this), GPs will be contractually obliged to seek remote “advice & guidance” from hospital clinicians, making it even harder to see an NHS specialist.

I am incredibly honoured be giving this year’s State of the Nation Lecture at Cambridge Lit Fest on Saturday 25 April, 12pm, in the beautiful setting of the Cambridge Union. My talk is entitled: “A Kindwashed Nation? Who Counts, What Counts and Making Britain Care Again” (1/4)

It was the honour of my life to win last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction & the madly idealistic, de Beauvoir-devouring 18-year-old me I describe in the piece above would have collapsed in astonishment if she had known what was to come. Glorious recommendations in the full piece - enjoy. (2/2)

What an absolute BLAST of book this is! Pure joy from start to finish. The sheer exuberance of these rollicking, riotous, fabulous pages. Francis Spufford is a storytelling genius. Thank you for giving me so much fun. Read this book, everyone - make your life sing!

Suboptimal for writing, but superlative for love #Harley 🩷

On #IWD2026, it feels fitting to sing the praises of this extraordinary book, read beautifully by Emma Thompson. If you’ve yet to read it, please do. Gisèle Pelicot’s strength, courage & basic human decency ring out from its pages - as does the grotesque misogyny of her courtroom experience...

I’m sorry, what? How can Chelsea & Westminster Hospital’s official charity *possibly* accept a £1 million ‘donation’ - meaning, in reality, an attempt to buy public credibility - from the Sacklers? Yes, those Sacklers, whose company, Purdue Pharma, caused >800k deaths from pumping out opioids. 1/3

Delighted to join @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social in Oxford on Tues April 14th to discuss her vitally important new book, 'Anywhere But Here' - a powerful exposé of Britain’s broken asylum system & how it fails us all. Please join us if you can. Tickets £6 from @blackwells.bsky.social.

Horrified & heartbroken by the latest ICE murder in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse & beloved son. Americans, please know how many millions of us here in the UK are sickened by Trump and his fascist thugs, and stand in solidarity with all of you resisting them 🇬🇧🇺🇸

Here’s to the NHS, to its founding principles, and to the fight to remain a society whose members continue fundamentally to care about each other. And here’s to you, Dad.

We in Britain inhabit a society that believes, collectively, in treating patients in need - irrespective of their ability to pay. How simple and decent and profoundly kind is that? My Dad gave his heart and soul to his NHS patients because he cared. It’s why I’m a doctor today.

The NHS is flawed and failing, the product of decades of underfunding, understaffing, outsourcing and the leaching of funds into private ‘providers’ hands. But it is still a jewel in the UK’s crown - the embodiment of something vital and profound.

It struck a particular chord with people in America, whose replies were often heartbreaking. Why? I think because my message was simple, expressing gratitude to the NHS & for the fact that the one thing we never had to worry about during Dad’s illness was how we would pay for it.

Curled up in grief the next day, I posted a tweet of thanks to that small army, the NHS staff who had held Dad throughout those fifteen long months of the cruelties of cancer. Improbably, the tweet set off around the world, being seen some 9 million times.

A small army of NHS community & palliative care nurses visited Dad daily, infusing his final days with acts of quiet tenderness. (I am painfully aware of how lucky he was. I sometimes treat patients who are dying on trolleys in hospital corridors - a travesty of what a good death should be).

On this day eight years ago, my dearest Dad died at home of bowel cancer. His death was a good as it can possibly be - cocooned within the love of his wife, children and grandchildren, with his symptoms palliated beautifully. 🧵

I've written this open letter to Keir Starmer & @rthonwesstreeting.bsky.social because, though I am desperately worried about NHS patients over the next 5 days, I know this strike by resident doctors is a desperate act of last resort. Please read.

The art of Saturday morning snoozing. Nobody does it quite like Queen Harley 🤎🐾

Such a treat to hear Philip Pullman read from The Rose Field tonight in Oxford's magnificent @bodleian.ox.ac.uk. The conversation beautifully chaired by @richove.bsky.social. Every word captivating 🌹

Glorious to hear the Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden interview Philip Pullman tonight at @bodleian.ox.ac.uk - including this priceless anecdote about some exceptional timing from Philip’s recent anaesthetist on the small matter of Dust … 💉🩺🤣

“We thank the committee for this report – we remain committed to transforming palliative and end of life care through our 10-Year Health Plan.” I’ve read the NHS 10-year plan cover to cover. It’s 171 pages long. Guess how many times the words “palliative care” appear? Once.

For anyone who cares about ensuring their loved ones can die with comfort & dignity, it makes for singularly depressing reading – key findings summarised in pics below. But perhaps most depressing of all is the government’s response to the report, this glib one-liner from a spokesperson:

🧵/ Today a damning parliamentary report on the state of palliative care services in England was published. Services are patchy, underfunded & “ill-equipped” to address end-of-life needs. Bereavement support is “frequently inaccessible. The palliative care workforce is in a “critical” situation”.