Men’s health a lesser priority
Having just completed nine years as a public governor of an NHS Foundation Trust, I see critical flaws in the Gazette’s assertion that ‘Put simply, health outcomes are worse for women than men’, given the basis on which this assessment is made (Roundtable: clinical negligence, 31 October). The heavy weighting of NHS and private healthcare compensation for clinical negligence towards female patients cannot be taken as a measure of health outcomes across patient groups.
Negligence claims arise from shortcomings in care. They do not measure access to care – but rather who is cared for. This means that men being excluded from care suffer harms and poor outcomes that negligence claims cannot measure.
Second, more women being cared for than men sadly means that more negligence claims from women will arise. But that arguably indicates discrimination against men rather than women. Outside the vale of tears of UK maternity services, neither does the report consider whether men harmed by shortcomings in care bring negligence claims at the same rate as women.
Discussion of women’s non-maternity health inequalities is then reported as focusing on their historical exclusion from medical trials of drugs designed to treat ‘cardiac issues’. The view is quoted that ‘medicine is geared up to work out how men have a heart attack’.
But men will not benefit from medicines they are excluded from accessing. To illustrate the extent of men’s exclusion from healthcare in my area, my local NHS integrated care system, serving two million people: has no men’s health strategy (there is a national women’s health strategy but no national men’s health strategy); runs no men’s health hubs; has no men’s health departments within its member trusts; and has no clinical directors of men’s health in its local authorities. Yet it has all of these for women. Nationally, an analysis of routinely collected UK general practice data finds that the ‘consultation rate was 32% lower in men than women’.
Men’s poor cardiovascular disease outcomes are singled out as the second of the main men’s health inequalities identified by the Department of Health and Social Care’s Men’s Health Strategy for England: call for evidence (19 June 2025). This states: ‘We know that men face unique challenges throughout their lives. Men are disproportionately affected by a number of health conditions including cancer, cardiovascular disease…’.
In the local authority area served by the acute site of the trust where I was a governor, men die about six years earlier than women. However, a senior member of the trust board told me in an open governor’s meeting that, ‘we accept that men die young’.
One panel member pointed to a skew in the discussion where she said: ‘I query sometimes whether, as lawyers, we are the right people to be talking about trends and outcomes. We only see one side of it and that’s the negative and the horrible, devastating impact on women.’
Her scepticism is clearly well-founded.
James Torr
Non-practising solicitor, London EC2
An absent attorney called Judah…
I was much amused by James Morton’s article on the barrister Billy Rees-Davies QC (Obiter, 17 October).
In 1976 or 1977, I was instructed to appear as a junior in what was, I believe, the last ever prosecution under the Exchange Control Act 1947. The alleged ringleader was a solicitor, Judah Binstock, now dead.
Binstock came up with the idea of passing off ordinary foreign currency as ‘investment currency’, or ‘dollar premium’ as it was generally known. Depending on the level of the premium, this scheme meant that a dollar bought at the ordinary exchange rate could be sold to yield anything approaching two dollars.
To achieve this required an ‘authorised depositary’ such as a stockbroker with what might be termed a flexible approach to Treasury regulations. One such broker was Lewis Altman, also now dead. The scheme was apparently reported to HM Treasury by a clerk at HSBC who was irritated by Altman’s high-handed approach towards him. Altman said that he only ever dealt with the manager.
We all ended up in the Guildhall Magistrates’ Court, with Billy Rees-Davies appearing for one Robert Carnes, a director of Lewis Altman & Co, with two juniors. Those juniors were John Suddards, who subsequently took holy orders and was murdered a few years ago, and yours truly. This caused a little confusion as to names, given not only ‘John Suddards’ and ‘Michael Stannard’, but also ‘Michael Sherrard’, then labouring under the cloud of allegedly allowing an innocent man, James Hanratty, to be hanged. It was some years later that DNA evidence proved that Hanratty was, in fact, guilty as charged.
Despite having been called to the bar just three years earlier, my expertise, such as it was, related to tax planning. I probably had more experience in relation to exchange control than any normal member of the bar, hence my being instructed in the case. I had absolutely no experience in advocacy.
Horror of horrors! Every junior barrister’s dread, when Billy Rees-Davies, my learned leader, was run over in, I think, Parliament Square and sent to hospital. The court was under the chairmanship of Louis Blom-Cooper QC, technically sitting as a lay magistrate.
Blom-Cooper refused the application to adjourn while another leader was found, putting the defence of Mr Carnes in my incapable hands. Very fortunately – although Carnes was, in fact, found guilty anyhow – another leader, albeit not a silk, was found very quickly. He was Ernle Money, former [Conservative] MP for Ipswich and shadow minister for the arts, who took over the defence. Money’s name caused yet more confusion as, when he introduced himself to me, I misheard ‘I’m Ernle Money’ as ‘I’m earning money’, which prompted a suitable quip in reply from me.
Many years later, I saw a letter from HM Treasury confirming that it did not have any evidence of Binstock’s guilt. I still remember Money’s limerick about Binstock, then a fugitive in Spain: ‘An absent attorney called Judah/Heard his friends getting ruder and ruder/He said “it’s a pain, to remain here in Spain”/On balance I think that it’s shrewder.’
Michael R Stannard
Verbier, Switzerland
No comments yet