Fathers ‘constantly fighting the NHS’ to get severely disabled sons the care they need

Published

2 years ago

January 26, 2023

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A father of four has said he is “constantly fighting the NHS” to get the care his two severely disabled sons need – and his fears about the future grow as he sees friends in similar situations putting their children into care.

Paul and his husband Michael Atwal-Brice adopted Levi and Lucas when the children were babies.

Now aged 16 and diagnosed with autism and epilepsy – among other disabilities – both parents have had to leave their jobs to care for them full-time.

They also care for Lotan and Lance, twin boys without any disabilities.

“Everything is just a battle with the NHS,” Paul, from Thurnscoe in South Yorkshire, told Sky News.

“Unless you’re prepared to stand up and fight, you get nothing.”

The two teens have been left waiting for NHS care at every stage.

Levi’s epilepsy means he requires frequent hospitalisation.

When Paul last had to call an ambulance – while the family were away on holiday – they had to wait 45 minutes, despite the fact Levi was bleeding heavily from the head. He had fallen while having a seizure and hit his head on a door frame.

“Once the seizures had stopped, he gets graded down to a category two, so the wait gets longer.

“Even though we were telling them he can’t wait because he won’t even let us touch his head and blood was going everywhere. It doesn’t matter.

“And this was before the latest strikes and challenges this winter.”

Once they had made it to the hospital, they then had to wait more than four hours in a hospital corridor to be seen.

“It was awful. Levi is severely autistic and non-verbal and he gets upset very easily so he was screaming the corridors down, upsetting other people, but they couldn’t move him.”

‘Friends are putting their children into care’

Levi and Lucas are both nearing adulthood, which leaves Paul fearing for their future.

“All the services are being cut back,” he said.

“The health service is a fight and struggle to get anywhere.

“A lot of friends of ours are putting their children into full-time care because they can’t cope with all the services being cut back, and this costs thousands and thousands a year to do this, a cost which the NHS has to pick up.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

Both boys need appointments every six weeks, but amid growing pressure on the National Health Service, this has been cut back to three months – and is often even six because clinicians cannot fit them in.

“It’s disgraceful,” said Paul. “Something needs to be done to fix this. These are life-saving appointments for the boys.”

Wendy Lowder, Barnsley executive director for place health and adult social care at NHS South Yorkshire said: “I’m really saddened about the experiences we’ve heard about from this family.

“Having a seamless transition between services when you reach 16 is so important to families at this time. Our teams have worked closely with the family to resolve all the issues they have experienced.

“We are now reviewing how the supply of these sorts of items works better for any families in the same situation in the future.”

Two months without food syringes

The teens are very underweight, so they have to be syringe fed fibre drinks from a dietician, but the hospital has said they can’t prescribe them any more.

Instead, the family has to get them via the GP.

But a communication breakdown left them without the required food for two months.

“We went to the GP just before Christmas and they didn’t know anything about it. They said they couldn’t order them either.”

Instead, Paul and Michael had to try and feed them with a plastic IKEA beaker, which turned out to be a “disaster”.

“They had liquid running down them as they couldn’t take the quantity, so there was a lot of waste and upset.

“We were promised we’d have a delivery to the house over Christmas, but it never came.”

South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has been contacted for comment.

A £5,000 energy bill

The family’s energy bills are going up £1,500 a year and they are estimated to pay almost £5,000 for their gas and electric in the next 12 months.

“Electric bills are our biggest worry of all.

“They’ve got to a stage where we can no longer carry them safely up and down stairs so we’ve had to have a lift fitted in the house. We can’t not have that going, it needs to be powered by electricity all the time.

“They have seizures all the time and the lift is literally a lifesaver.”

Meanwhile, the washing machine is constantly running because the boys are incontinent, and bedsheets and clothing have to be changed all the time.

The NHS will only provide four nappies a day to the family: “This is crazy. How can you tell the boys that they can only wee and poo four times a day? You wouldn’t do that to anyone.

“Their beds are electric, they have a therapy bath that also runs on power and their sensory room is full of calming lights and sounds that also cost money.

“In addition to all this, we are now spending £120 on fuel a week.”

Kicking off a major ongoing project on the future of the National Health Service, an hour-long debate into the future of the NHS will take place this evening, live from University Hospital Coventry.

It begins at 7pm and will be hosted by Sky News presenter Anna Botting alongside a special panel.

If you are an NHS worker and would like to share your experiences with us anonymously, please email NHSstories@sky.uk.

UK

Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Published

8 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Liverpool players past and present have joined the family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva for their funeral in Portugal.

A service was held in the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in their hometown of Gondomar near Porto in northern Portugal on Saturday morning.

Mourners lined the streets and some in the crowd clapped as the brothers’ coffins were carried into the church.

The funeral – in pictures

Jota, 28, leaves behind his wife of only 11 days, Rute Cardoso, and three young children.

His younger brother, 25, was an attacking midfielder for Penafiel in the second tier of Portuguese football.

Liverpool manager Arne Slot, captain Virgil Van Dijk and teammates including Andy Robertson, Conor Bradley, Ryan Gravenberch, Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez and Joe Gomez were seen at the service.

Former teammates Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Fabinho were also there.

Van Dijk carried a red wreath with Jota’s number 20, while Robertson had a wreath featuring number 30, Silva’s number at Penafiel.

Some of Jota’s teammates in the Portuguese national side also attended, including Bruno Fernandes, of Manchester United, Ruben Dias and Bernardo Silva, of Manchester City, Joao Felix and Renato Veiga, of Chelsea, Nelson Semedo, from Wolves, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio.

Ruben Neves was one of the pallbearers after flying in from Florida where he played for Al Hilal in the Club World Cup quarter-final on Friday night.

‘More than a friend’

In a post published on Instagram before the service, he told Jota he had been “more than a friend, we’re family, and we won’t stop being that way just because you’ve decided to sign a contract a little further away from us!”

Jota’s fellow Liverpool midfielder, Alexis Mac Allister, said on Instagram: “I can’t believe it. I’ll always remember your smiles, your anger, your intelligence, your camaraderie, and everything that made you a person. It hurts so much; we’ll miss you. Rest in peace, dear Diogo.”

Porto FC president Andre Villas-Boas and Portugal national team manager Roberto Martinez were also in attendance.

‘With us forever’

Speaking after the ceremony, Martinez said the period since their deaths had been “really, really sad days, as you can imagine, but today we showed we are a large, close family.

“Their spirit will be with us forever.”

The service was private, but the words spoken by the Bishop of Porto, Manuel Linda, were broadcast to those standing outside the church.

He told Jota’s children, who were not at the service, that he was praying for them specifically, as well as their mother and grandparents.

“There are no words, but there are feelings,” he said, adding: “We also suffer a lot and we are with you emotionally.”

The brothers died after a Lamborghini they were travelling in burst into flames following a suspected tyre blowout in the early hours of Thursday morning.

No other vehicles are said to have been involved in the incident.

Liverpool have delayed the return of their players for pre-season following Jota’s death and players past and present paid tribute to him and his brother on social media.

Flowers have been left outside Anfield, where flags have been lowered to half-mast and all club shops, museums and tours have been closed until Monday.

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

11 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

12 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.