Eleanor Hayward

In a year when Ozempic dominated the news agenda, Eleanor Hayward exposed the dark side of the booming market for weight loss drugs. Her investigation revealed how patients can easily obtain powerful drugs such as Wegovy online from high street pharmacies - even if they are a healthy weight. This story involved going undercover and getting prescriptions from Boots and Superdrug, and conducting interviews with expert doctors, to lay bare how the online weight loss drug market is posing a risk to lives.

As well as being widely read and shared online, this investigation had an immediate national impact in helping to protect patients. In response to the story, Boots announced that - from the next day - they would introduce additional checks on patients buying weight-loss drugs online. The story also prompted the NHS to adopt a new policy and call for a requirement for patients to have in-person checks, with Labour also pledging to consider tighter regulations in government.

In February, Eleanor wrote a front page exclusive which revealed that more than 100 women who underwent treatment at a prestigious NHS fertility clinic had been told their frozen eggs or embryos may no longer be viable, with cancer patients among those affected.

The NHS trust had attempted to hide the scandal, failing to inform patients for nearly a year, but this story put it into the public light. It involved sensitively gaining the trust of affected women and persuading them to tell their story. The story was followed up by all other national news outlets and widely discussed on radio for days. It highlighted the risks of egg freezing - a procedure that is growing in popularity in the UK - and put the spotlight on the safety of other fertility clinics.

In another investigation, Eleanor used months of FOI work to expose horrific conditions in NHS mental health hospitals and how these are costing lives. The story involved sending FOIs to every NHS Trust in the country to get information on inpatient suicides, as well as infrastructure failings on mental health wards that pose a risk to patient safety.

This revealed that 232 mental health patients have killed themselves on NHS wards since 2018, and found that wards are infested with vermin, with some leaking sewage. Eleanor put humans at the heart of her story - speaking to patients who had spent time on “prison-like” wards, and to grieving parents who had lost children to suicide.

The story had a significant impact in shining a light on an area that often does not get attention, and highlighting the importance of reforms to the Mental Health Act. The figures on suicides were used by core participants at the Lampard Inquiry, an statutory inquiry into the deaths of mental health inpatients in Essex. The revelations about cockroach and rat infestations also featured in Lord Ara Darzi’s landmark report into the NHS, published in September, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer commenting on “mental health patients accommodated in Victorian-era cells.