Ferret Underground: Mind the health gap

Hi ,

Our new podcast, The Ferret Investigates, is now available wherever you get your podcasts!

We begin with a three-part series examining the health gap between rich and poor. The epsiodes look at health inequalities faced in Scotland and how radical approaches to tackling this disparity have found success in other parts of the world.

Listen to the episodes here and get stuck into the rest of our Mind the Health Gap reporting here.

There are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for The Ferret. In a few weeks, we'll be taking a deep dive into the state of Scotland's environmental protection in a new investigation.

Ferret journalists have also been working with students at Stirling University to help them develop investigations of their own, which you'll see on The Ferret later in the year.

And if that wasn't enough, you can expect all our usual investigations, fact checks and podcasts as well. You lucky bunch.

In Scotland, men in the most deprived areas have a life expectancy of almost 14 years less than those in the most affluent areas. Of the 753 people that completed suicide in 2021, three quarters were men.

In this episode of our health gap podcast we hear from James, a joiner from Glasgow, about his struggles with his mental health and Bill Hill of the Lighthouse charity tells us about the way the construction industry, which is currently losing two workers to suicide every day, has been forced to mobilise to save lives.

We also visit San Francisco’s Harm Reduction Therapy Center and find out how offering people struggling with substance use therapy on the street is dismantling the myth that some are hard to reach.