Fail -> Isn't Needed.
There's a bunch of public health stuff where England needs to do better. (Mothers smoking through pregnancy, mothers drinking too much through pregnancy, mother taking drugs through pregnancy, mothers eating too much through pregnancy, children not breast fed, children weaned too soon, children weaned with wrong food, children given added-sugar drinks, children and mothers at risk of violence, children and mothers at risk of accidental harm, etc etc. (It's a long list! And there's plenty more)
This are partially helped by the universal access new mothers have to health visitors, and access to things like Sure Start Centres (I'm not sure if those centres are still available though), but there's still a lot to be done.
Smoking during pregnancy has been on the decline for years, and 2014 was the lowest it's been.
http://www.hscic.gov.uk/article/4788/Prevalence-of-mothers-s...
> Today's report shows the prevalence of women who classed themselves as smokers whilst pregnant fell to 12.0 per cent (75,910 out of 632,960 maternities)3 from 12.7 per cent (83,490 out of 658,110 maternities) in the previous year4, and this continues the steady decline from 2006-07 when this was 15.1 per cent.5
Lowest on record, but still 12% is pretty high. I suspect the reason, as you say, is the taboo. A pregnant woman who smokes faces a lot of judgement, so she's probably going to smoke at home.
It goes on but not so much in public though.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ghs/opinions-and-lifestyle-sur...
http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB14184/alc-eng-2014-rep....
(I'm on mobile at the moment so I'm having trouble finding rates for dependant drinkers who don't cut down while pregnant. That first link suggest 2% of pregnant women don't cut down or even drink more, but that doesn't tell me how much they used to drink - someone drinking one glass once a month moving to one glass once a fortnight has doubled their consumption but probably isn't doing any harm)
Sure Start:
But 12 years after the first Sure Start centres opened, one leading academic who was part of the government's official evaluation of the scheme says there is still no clear evidence it has helped children
Asked what evidence there was that Sure Start was helping children, Sir Michael replies: "We don't know - that is still lacking." One major problem, he says, was that ministers ignored calls for a properly controlled evaluation of the programme - in which children would have been randomly assigned to a Sure Start or a non-Sure Start group. He accuses Labour of deliberately ignoring the possibility the programme might not work
Every country can always do better in health care: perfection is not achievable. But most studies I've seen suggest that the UK gets health outcomes that are good, albeit not the best, but it does so for much less money than many systems. When you normalise for costs, the NHS is actually pretty darn good.
I agree with your comments about the NHS, for most stuff it's great and very cheap. (Sad that I need to say that, but there are people who want to dismantle it).
This government is, with one hand, pushing millions deeper into poverty and a significant portion of that into homelessness. With the other, battering the national health service into a for-profit machine in time for when these desperate souls will need it most.
It's just a shame that many in our nation believe these people to be 'scroungers' and 'not worth helping'. It's far more shameful that these same people don't clock how the news outlets feeding them this crap change their tune like a faulty jukebox.
Above sounds challenging. That is not my intent. I've done physics at post-doc level. I've taught for 25+ years. I've been involved in community development in my spare time for 40 years. The fields differ in surprising ways. Empiricism has an oddly limited remit.