The Government is trying to reassure women fitted with PIP implants to prevent a rush for NHS surgery to remove faulty breast implants.The adverts, to run in a number of national newspapers at the weekend, will emphasise there is “no clear evidence” that the French made implants cause more harm than other brands.

Almost £135,000 is being spent by the Department of Health on the campaign, which will also run in social media sites. Posters will appear in GPs’ surgeries and hospitals as well.

The advert reads: “The latest advice from the NHS and plastic surgery experts is that women with PiP breast implants do not need to have them removed unless they have symptoms such as pain and tenderness.

“There is no link to cancer and there is no clear evidence of an increased risk of harm compared to other brands of breast implants.”

However, it also states, in large-type at the top of the advert: “The NHS will support women with PiP breast implants.”

Clarifying the situation for those who received implants as part of private breast enlargement operations, it states: “”The NHS will remove your implants if your doctor agrees, but the NHS will not replace implants unless it is clinically necessary.”

It advises those worried about whether they have implants made by Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which contain industrial-grade silicone, to find out if they have them, to speak to their specialist or GP, and “agree what’s best for you”.

Despite the campaign, Fazel Fatah, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), said the organisation’s stance remained that all 40,000 women fitted with them in Britain should have them removed.

He said: “We remain steadfast in our recommendation to the public of precautionary removal of these defective devices. Although there is no immediate health risk, the gel within these implants is simply not meant to be inside the human body.”

A survey of its 230 members found 95 per cent agreed that “it should be the clinics and hospitals that should pay for the replacement surgery, rather than burden the taxpayer with these costs”.

Women given the PIP implants are due to protest in London on Saturday at the reluctance of private firms like Harley Medical Group, The Hospital Group and Transform Cosmetic Surgery to fund removal and replacement surgery.

Explaining the rationale for the campaign, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “The refusal of some clinics to help their patients has left some of those women worried and confused.

“That’s why we are running this ad campaign, to give women clear, definitive advice about what course of action they should take. I hope it helps women decide what is best for them. We have made it very clear to private companies what we expect of them – to provide their patients with the aftercare that they need and deserve.”

“I do not think it is fair to the taxpayer or other NHS patients for the NHS to foot the bill.  We will pursue private clinics with all means at our disposal to avoid this.”

Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS medical director and leader of an expert group on PIP implants convened by Mr Lansley, said: “At present there is insufficient evidence to recommend routine removal of these implants.

“But I know women will be worried. That’s why the expert group supports the NHS offer and believes the private industry should do the same.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Breast-implant-scandal-Government-campaign-to-reassure-women

The number of people being admitted to hospital after drinking too much alcohol has more than doubled in less than a decade, new research show.Some 1,173,386 people in England were admitted to casualty for injuries or illnesses caused by drinking in 2010/11, compared with just 510,780 in 2002/3, according to the research.

The figures for last year represent an 11 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, when alcohol-related admissions stood at 1,056,962.

Separate information published by Anne Milton, the public health minister, showed that since January an estimated 7,074 under-18s have been admitted to hospital due to alcohol abuse.

A recent report predicted that binge drinking will cost the NHS £3.8 billion by 2015, with 1.5 million A&E admissions a year.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, blamed Labour’s 24-hour drinking policy and accused the last government of “taking their eye of the ball” on the issue of binge drinking.

He said: “These figures are disturbing evidence that, despite total consumption of alcohol not increasing recently, we have serious problems with both binge-drinking and long-term excessive alcohol abuse in a minority of people.

“Our alcohol strategy, which we will set out in the new year, will outline what further steps we are taking to tackle this growing problem.”

Recent Local Alcohol Profiles for England figures also show that the number of hospital admissions for conditions attributable to alcohol are rising at a similar rate.

The number of admissions has more than doubled since 2002/03 and increased by nine per cent last year.

In 2002/03 there were 926 admissions per 100,000 people for conditions caused by alcohol, rising to 1,743 per 100,000 in 2009/10 and 1,898 last year.

The biggest increase over the past 12 months was in London, with a jump in admissions of 14 per cent, followed by the East of England with 10 per cent.

The number of NHS patients who have to undergo emergency readmission to hospital within a month of being discharged has increased by more than three quarters over the last decade, the Daily Telegraph has disclosed.Hospitals have been accused by ministers of treating patients “like parts on a production line” after official figures suggested that hundreds of thousands of people every year are being sent home before they are well enough.

More than 660,000 people were brought back to hospital last year within 28 days of leaving, statistics show, sparking allegations that patients are being “hurried through the system” so the NHS can meet waiting-list targets.

The official figures show that some NHS trusts have seen their emergency readmission rate rise more than threefold over the past decade – while some hospitals have seen only a modest increase.

Last night, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said that the “hugely distressing” trend must stop.

“Patients have a right to expect that when they go in for treatment that they are looked after properly and that the treatment they are given helps them to recover,” he said.

“Having to be readmitted and treated all over again is hugely distressing. These figures show how Labour’s obsession with waiting time targets meant that patients were treated like parts on a production line to be hurried through the system rather than like people who need to be properly cared for.”

The Department of Health has released detailed information on the number of emergency readmissions in every area across Britain.

The figures show that 620,054 patients had to be readmitted in 2009-10 – compared to just 348,996 a decade before, a 78 per cent increase. Over the past five years, there has been a 31 per cent rise and a five per cent increase on the previous 12 months.

The data also highlights the widespread regional variations. The rate of readmission in the Kensington & Chelsea PCT area has risen by 287 per cent over the past decade to 1,582 people.

However, North Lincolnshire PCT has only experienced a 3.37 per cent rise over the same period.

Hospitals within the Hampshire PCT area readmitted 13,239 people last year. The nearby area covered by the Isle of Wight PCT only had to readmit 1,098 people.

The figures, do not include patients suffering from cancer or mental health problems or maternity patients.

Most of the areas with the highest increases in readmission numbers are in London and the south east, where pressure is greatest on the NHS. The Department of Health has analysed the social make-up of each area and concludes that the so-called “thriving London periphery” – the relatively wealthy commuter hinterland around the capital has suffered the biggest recent deterioration.

About 10 million people are admitted to hospital wards each year. Critics claim that government targets, such as the demand that patients be admitted to hospital for treatment within 18 weeks of seeing their GP, mean hospital managers are pressured into releasing patients early to make beds available.

Earlier this month, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that the Government is moving from a system of targets for hospitals based on waiting and treatment times – to a system of so-called “outcomes” which measures the success of treatment.

In a criticism of previous targets which he blames for the increase in emergency readmissions, Mr Lansley said: “Instead of focusing on the results which actually matter for patients, they focused on narrow processes to the detriment of patient care. That is why we have taken action to address these increases in emergency readmissions.

“One of the new goals we are setting the NHS is reducing emergency readmissions. In order to help achieve this we have created a re-ablement fund of £300 million and we have taken action to stop hospitals being paid when they readmit a patient after discharging them too early. These steps will turn Labour’s poor performance around.”

Under the Government scheme, hospitals will effectively be responsible for people’s care in the weeks after they return home and will be financially penalised for discharging patients too soon.

From:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Scandal-of-NHS-production-line-as-readmissions-soar

Andrew Lansley has called on the NHS to focus on “what really matters” as he prepares to announce plans to judge hospitals and doctors against 60 new goals that are designed to save more than 20,000 lives a year.The Health Secretary has unveiled a new system to assess success in the health service based on the quality of care patients receive – not merely the speed at which they are treated.

Comprehensive data on hospital death rates, the individual performance of GPs and surgeons and patients’ experiences under their care are to be published in an attempt to improve standards.

Mr Lansley has set out 60 benchmarks that will replace Labour’s system of targets and will be used to define success in the NHS.

These include a commitment to preventing unnecessary early deaths, a pledge to enhance the quality of life for people with long-term conditions and a drive to ensure that people have a positive experience when using the health service.

If the new standards are achieved, 24,000 early deaths a year could be prevented from cancer and other long-term conditions, Mr Lansley believes.

In addition, fewer people with long-term conditions including asthma and diabetes will be treated in hospitals, he will claim, while patients undergoing routine hip and knee operations will no longer be left in pain or unable to walk.

Access to NHS dentists will also be improved, he will say.

The Cabinet minister said the record on unnecessary early deaths varied across specialties as he urged the health service to focus on “what really matters” – the results achieved for patients and their experiences while being treated.

“If you look at the question of how many patients in this country die who could live if they got the best health care, it is literally over 10,000 patients a year if we were simply to get to a place which is better than the average across the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.”

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Lansley says his tenure as Health Secretary will have been a “failure” if the 60 new “outcome” targets do not improve by the next election. He pledges that the benchmarks will now “define what the NHS is setting out to achieve”.

“We have to clear the decks and be clear this is what we are focusing on,” he says. “People say in three and a half years’ time, in 2015, at the next election, how will we know whether you’ve succeeded or not? The answer is ‘have the outcomes improved?’

“It will be my failure if we haven’t improved them and the NHS should feel that it has not succeeded, that is what we are setting out to do.”

Next week, the Government will set out current performance for each of the 60 indicators. It will then set out national targets for improvement “by the time of the next election and beyond”.

The new NHS Commissioning Board and the Care Quality Commission will also intervene directly to address problems that are highlighted by the data.

In today’s interview, Mr Lansley says that the long-running row over NHS reform must end and the health service must concentrate on improving patient care.

“We’ve really got to get into the big picture, which is delivering improvements in the results we achieve for patients right across the board,” he said. “We know that we can do it.”

The benchmarks will be monitored partly through studying clinical data – for example, to ascertain whether mortality rates for cancer, liver and heart disease are improving — and partly through surveying patients to gauge whether they were satisfied by the standard of care they received and the speed of their recovery.

The Health Secretary says: “This is literally saying to patients ‘if you were in hospital, if you were being looked after by your general practitioner was the service and experience you had good or not?’ It’s not like some other kinds of medical model where you kind of treat people and they get better. This is different.

“This is really where you begin to kind of focus on the experience of care.”

For the first time, the views of bereaved relations and even children will be surveyed so that the quality of NHS care from early years until death can be assessed.

“We’ll be undertaking a consistent national survey of the bereaved relatives of people who received end of life care,” Mr Lansley said. “Asking them, after a suitable passage of time, what was their loved one’s experience of care and how well were they looked after towards the end of life.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Andrew-Lansley-sixty-step-plan-to-help-NHS-focus-on-what-matters

Hospital managers are planning to postpone thousands of non emergency operations today, because of the public sector unions striking over pension changes.Patients across the UK have been sent letters warning them of the disruption.

Diagnostic tests and outpatient appointments will also be delayed, but hospitals insist emergency and critical care will not be affected.

Managers say they are preparing as they would for Christmas or bank holidays.

An estimated 400,000 nurses and healthcare assistants, as well as paramedics, physiotherapists, and support staff like cleaners and administrators have said they will join the action on 30 November over changes to public sector pensions.

However, the main medical unions – the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives and the British Medical Association are not taking part.

The Department of Health in England said it was expecting at least 5,500 non-emergency procedures like hip and knee operations to be rearranged.

More than 12,000 patients are likely to have diagnostic tests postponed, and 40,000 outpatient appointments are expected to be rescheduled.

On an average day, 28,000 patients have planned treatments or operations in England and there are 60,000 diagnostic tests.

However, managers say they are putting plans in place to make sure people can still get emergency or urgent care, in the way they do on bank holidays or at Christmas.
999 calls

Patients needing urgent treatment like chemotherapy and kidney dialysis will still be able to get it, and maternity units will remain open.

Calls to 999 will still be answered, but patients are being urged to think hard and only call if it is a genuine emergency.

The Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said health service workers should not take action that harms the interests of patients.

“I would ask staff to consider carefully whether going on strike is the right thing to do,” he said.

Cancer care on the NHS lags behind that in many other developed countries because Labour wasted billions of pounds on PFI schemes, bureaucracy and inflated salaries for managers.A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that, despite record spending on health care, cancer survival rates in Britain are worse than in Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Survival rates for breast cancer, prostate cancer and cervical cancer were below the average for the 34 developed countries in the study.

Mr Lansley lays the blame for the poor performance on the previous government’s failure to make sure that extra investment in the NHS reached the front line. He claims patient care was ignored in favour of increased salaries and botched computer systems.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Lansley says: “Unfortunately this report shows how much work there is to do to deal with Labour’s legacy of neglect and mismanagement of our NHS.

“They hugely increased spending on the Health Service, but wasted much of it on managers, failed IT projects and unsustainable PFI projects.

“They failed to focus on what really matters – patients – which is why we still have some of the worst cancer outcomes amongst comparable countries.”

Under Labour, spending on the NHS trebled, reaching almost £100 billion in 2009, but money for treating cancer still lags behind much of the rest of the world.

A report by the Policy Exchange think tank last year found that England spent around 5.6 per cent of its health care budget on cancer care, compared with 7.7 per cent in France, 9.6 per cent in Germany and 9.2 per cent in America.

In September it emerged that private finance initiatives, introduced by Labour to fund capital projects, have left 60 NHS hospitals on the “brink of financial collapse”. Meanwhile, the pay of NHS chief executives has risen, with typical earnings now more than £150,000.

The OECD figures reveal that the best breast cancer survival rates were in the US, where 89.3 per cent of women were alive five years after being diagnosed. The average across all OECD countries was 83.5 per cent, while in the UK it was 81.3 per cent.

Survival rates for cervical cancer were worse. Norway topped the table with 78.2 per cent still alive after five years, compared with 58 per cent of women in the UK. There were also more hospital admissions for asthma and other lung conditions than the average and infant mortality was higher.

The report also showed that consultations by doctors have fallen, and were below he OECD average in 2009.

Katherine Murphy, the chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “The NHS provides some excellent care but it does fall down on many counts. We know from patients phoning our helpline that the quality of care that they have experienced can be very poor and sometimes it is downright neglectful.

“Rather than trying to tackle the issue of poor care, the Department of Health is demanding that the NHS makes £20 billion of efficiency savings while spending a million pounds a day on a reform plan that doctors, nurses, patients and NHS managers all say risks irrevocably damaging the NHS.”

From:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Cancer-cash-wasted-on-NHS-salaries

One in eight calls to the NHS’s new non emergency health direct phone number are going unanswered, amid reports people are having to wait over half an hour.Ministers want 111 to be the only number people need to call in England, “if you urgently need medical help or advice but it’s not a life threatening situation”.

But a pilot in four areas – Luton, County Durham and Darlington, Lincolnshire, and Nottingham – is highlighting worrying problems.

Official statistics show that in September, 12 per cent of calls went unanswered.

Across the four areas there were 33,707 calls to the service.

The Department of Health expects 12 million calls a year to the free 111 number in England, based on scaling up that figure.

Writing on the NHS’s own web page about the 111 number, one caller expressed frustration at being unable to get through despite waiting 35 minutes.

“All I wanted was a bit of advice. I now need to go to work and have had no help from anyone,” the caller wrote. “I had the sense to take pain killers myself, hope this new service gets better.”

A month ago Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, announced that 111 would be rolled out nationwide by April 2013, abolishing the concept of “out-of-hours” care. It is also meant to encompass NHS Direct.

The Department of Health claimed the September statistics showed an “encouraging picture”.

A spokesman said: “Lessons learned from the pilots will ensure that when the service is rolled out nationally it will provide people with a first class service.”

He added: “We know that unanswered calls are usually callers who get through to the NHS 111 message and hang up. This could be because they wanted to speak to their GP practice, but it was still in the ‘out of hours’ period and they were therefore transferred to NHS 111.

“This figure does not mean patients are receiving a poor service.”

A spokesman for NHS Direct echoed this, saying the vast majority of the 12 per cent of unanswered calls were of people who chose to hang up, after learning they were being put through to the 111 service when they wanted to speak directly to their GP.

From:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-111-number-1-in-8-calls-unanswered

Are women being over examined by an over cautious health nanny state?In an uncertain world, we want to believe in the certainty of medicine: that it is omniscient and operates in absolutes. In reality, this is far from the truth. The world of medicine reflects the world we live in; constantly in flux with multifarious contradictions.

Scientists relish this fact. However, for those on the outside, this can be bewildering. We are told one thing one minute, only for it to be ridiculed the next. With its definitions and protocols, medicine serves to give the illusion of stability when, in truth, doctors are all too often unsure.

The furore around breast screening perfectly illustrates this. It began when the Government’s cancer “tsar”, Prof Sir Mike Richards, announced that he is setting up an independent review of the NHS programme.

He has also ordered that patient leaflets, which explain the screening programme, be rewritten to take into account claims by some experts that the benefits have been exaggerated.

Understandably, this has prompted widespread confusion. The issue of breast cancer is always emotive. When I worked in breast surgery, I saw first hand the horrors of this disease on sufferers and their families, and it is vital that we do everything we can to treat and prevent it. But the debate over screening has been raging for some time within the medical community. I remember attending a lecture on this issue when I was at medical school more than 10 years ago.

The NHS screening programme was introduced by the Thatcher government following the 1987 Forrest Report, which recommended a national screening programme for breast cancer for women aged between 50 and 74. The report was based on the most up-to-date research.

But, since then, by comparing countries that have a screening programme with those that don’t, evidence has emerged suggesting that the steady fall in mortality in Western countries is not due to the screening programme, but to improved treatment and service provision.

If this is shown to be true – and it’s still a big if – then this would mean we are needlessly screening thousands of women. And there is an argument that many of the tumours detected by screening would not actually have developed into a life-threatening cancer.

For every screening test, whatever the disease, there is a margin of error. How good a test is can boil down to two things. The first is sensitivity, which measures how good the test is at giving a positive result in those who have the disease. The second is specificity, which refers to how many of those tested are disease-free and test negative.

Now, if you act on the results every time a test records a positive – in the case of breast cancer by doing invasive surgery or giving radiotherapy or chemotherapy – the sensitivity and specificity has to be very high (as near to 100 per cent as possible) to warrant a national screening programme. If it’s not sensitive enough, you’ll be giving women false reassurance when, in fact, tumours are being missed. Similarly, if it’s not specific enough, you’ll be needlessly treating people, with all the associated risks that treatment brings. It is this that is concerning some experts.

They argue that women are being over-diagnosed and over-treated because screening is not specific enough. It can pick up breast abnormalities that may look worrying when biopsied but are actually harmless. It’s a balancing act between saving lives and not causing harm by needless treatment. While doctors are used to adapting to changes in evidence, this is little consolation to women who worry about the disease.

It is perfectly sensible to have an independent review of the research, but I can’t help but think of the women who have had treatment,or are facing treatment, or those who are deciding if they should go for screening. The fact that the current debate waging in the medical establishment is part of the reflexive process that underpins science is of little comfort to them.

Let’s deal firmly with those who fail in patient care

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley should be congratulated – and it’s not often I say that – for his announcement last week that widespread spot checks on hospitals and care homes will be introduced in a drive to improve standards.

The checks will be undertaken by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). It comes after the Government reviewed the findings of the first wave of unannounced visits to care of the elderly wards in the summer. Over half the hospitals inspected had problems, particularly in relation to issues around patient dignity.

Spot checks are the way to tackle this and weed out bad practice and serious failings. But, they will only have any meaning if the CQC – often felt by those campaigning for improved standards as toothless – act on what they find. We don’t need endless reports and bureaucratic stalling. If it will work, the CQC will have to use its muscle. Those in charge of wards and hospitals found to be failing must be held accountable and dealt with firmly.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/the-ifs-and-buts-of-breast-screening

Single women are being offered fertility treatment by almost a fifth of NHS trusts casting doubt on the Government’s family friendly credentials.Women not in relationships are receiving publicly funded IVF despite official guidance that suggests support should go to couples who have been trying without success to have a baby for several years.

Meanwhile in other parts of the country married couples are being denied help in starting a family, forcing them to spend thousands of pounds on private treatment.

It comes after a Labour nanny state law removed the requirement for fertility doctors to consider a child’s need to have a male role model before going ahead with IVF.

Critics say the Government, which David Cameron promised would be “the most family friendly we’ve ever had in this country”, should tackle the postcode lottery of IVF provision and ensure that the needs of children are put first.

Frank Field, the Labour MP who carried out a high-profile review into poverty and life chances last year, said: “It’s clearly wrong that while couples in stable relationships can’t get IVF and in other areas, single women can.

“It’s really important that Government ministers speak up for children who are the ones left out of this. It needs someone in a position of authority to reflect what most taxpayers think.”

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester who once chaired the ethics committee of Britain’s fertility watchdog, said: “The irony is that at the very time research is showing the need for both parents, we are writing fathers out of the legislation.

“It’s one thing for a mother to find herself a single parent because of tragic circumstances. It’s quite another to plan for a situation where the child comes into the world without having a father or any possibility of having a father.”

Most local health authorities stipulate that couples must have been in a relationship for two or three years to qualify for IVF treatment.

That requirement is based on guidance issued in 2004 by the National Institute for Curbing Expenditure (Nice), the NHS rationing body,.

It states: “Couples in which the woman is aged 23–39 years at the time of treatment and who have an identified cause for their fertility problems … or who have infertility of at least three years’ duration, should be offered up to three stimulated cycles of in vitro fertilisation treatment.”

The document does note that the guidelines do not address social criteria “for example, whether it is single women or same-sex couples who are seeking treatment”.

However the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 removed the reference to “the need for a father” when considering the welfare of the child when considering fertility treatment, replacing it with “the need for supportive parenting”.

Gareth Johnson MP, who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility, said that trusts offering the service to single women were going against one of the guiding principles of IVF, “that you are treating an infertile couple, not an infertile individual”.

Mr Johnson, the Conservative MP for Dartford, said: “Speaking in a personal capacity, if you are going for IVF, you are trying to create a baby, so there should be some evidence of a stable background, which you would expect to be a couple.”

Earlier this year he led an APPG report that found startling differences between what health authorities offered in terms of IVF.

It found three-quarters of Primary Care Trusts were failing to offer three cycles of IVF, as stipulated by Nice. Each cycle comprises a woman’s ovaries being stimulated to produce eggs, which are then fertilised in vitro and implanted in the womb. Spare eggs should be frozen for use if the first attempt fails.

The report found five trusts offered no IVF at all – Warrington, West Sussex, Stockport, North Staffordshire and North Yorkshire and York. Since then, NHS West Sussex has decided to start funding IVF again.

Many trusts have also started putting in place further barriers to IVF funding – for example demanding obese women lose weight – in part to limit demand as health budgets tighten.

Against a background of increasingly scarce provision, as the NHS tries to save £20billion by 2015, Mr Johnson said the decision to offer IVF to single women was misplaced.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Single-women-being-offered-IVF-on-the-NHS

Luxury car makers are building bigger cars as a result of drivers and passengers becoming more overweight.Typical family cars have become more than a foot wider and almost double the weight over the past 50 years as manufacturers struggle with the world’s obesity crisis.

Consequently some luxury manufacturers have begun road testing the next generation of larger sized vehicles.

In plans dubbed “plump my ride” – in a play of words from the television show Pimp My Ride – BMW has recruited 800 volunteers, ranging from the slim to the obese, for a study to gauge how obesity affects mobility while driving.

The unnamed volunteers were put through a series of tests designed in part to examine factors such as getting in and out of cars or looking over their shoulder while reversing.

“People are getting more obese and we want to find out how that limits their range of motion and how our vehicles can adapt to the changing needs of our customers,” Ralf Kaiser, a member of BMW’s ergonomics team, told the Sunday Times.

“We know that a lot of overweight and obese people have problems in daily life, and in the car this starts with getting in and getting out.  In general, these aren’t sporty people. We already have things like the parking distance control, which shows obstacles on a screen when you are reversing.”

He added: “For someone who can find it difficult to turn 140 degrees to look behind them, they can now just look at the screen.  The study will mean we can look at things more scientifically and build a car that at least 95 per cent of people can use.”

Mercedes has unveiled plans to strengthen grab handles above its doors, in part to help heavier passengers support themselves.

Porsche, meanwhile, is installing “electrically-powered steering columns” on top-of-the-range models that rise when the engine is switched off.

Over the past decade, Honda has widened its seats by up to 2 inches to accommodate larger bottoms while its new range of vehicles will also have buttons that will allow for so called “sausage fingers”.

Other manufacturers are installing reversing aids and blind spot detectors as standard.

According to the latest figures a Ford Prefect was 4ft 9in wide with an 18 inch long seat cushion in 1953. This compared to a 2011 Ford Focus that was 6ft 1in wide with a 23 inch long seat cushion.

Government statistics show that more than 60 per cent of adults in England and a third of 10 and 11-year-olds are obese.

In August The Lancet medical journal said that by 2030 more than 11m would classed as obese, with a body mass index (BMI) above 30, compared with a healthy BMI score of between 18.5 and 25.

Obesity and chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes cost Britain £20 billion a year in terms of lost productivity, it was claimed last month.

It was recently disclosed that over the past five years Yorkshire Ambulance Service spent nearly £10 million on specialist vehicles to transport obese patients.

Speaking earlier this month at a launch that unveiled plans to cut obesity levels by 2020, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said Britain had to become a nation of calorie counters to counter the obesity crisis.