My dad enjoys being part of the 'worried-well', he regularly tells me how much fruit and veg he eats, how healthy he is - But he takes a multitude of pills and is down the surgery collecting a prescription every 2 weeks. He laughs it off when I say it's overkill, but he says its his right after paying taxes all his life. I recently had an outpatients op and the service I received was excellent, the waiting time was an issue in how long it took to go from GP > Consultant > operation though, but it wasn't urgent so I didn't worry. 2 patients cancelled their ops the morning of the operation whilst I was sat in the waiting room.
Missed/cancelled appointments drive me up the wall! Language is powerful though. If you insist on calling patients 'customers' that's how they will behave. Give them the myth of 'choice' and they'll soon forget the days when they could just book an appointment with their GP a day or two ahead.
What appears to make the USA unique, at least among democracies, is the willingness of the political establishment to allow towns that have lost their industry to curl up and die. There are plenty of towns and regions in the UK which have lost their traditional industries - coal, steel, docks, shipyards, fishing - but at least there are always attempts, however effective they may or may not be - to attract alternative employers into the region. The idea of allowing the equivalent of Cities like Detroit, or Baltimore, to become ghost towns, while expecting the inhabitants to up sticks and migrate to the towns with jobs; well that wouldn't work in Europe. We don't have the room for a start.
@LordStras #IPBill Lib Dems just voted alone in Lords against Tories & Labour to try to stop virtual database on all UK citizens. More to follow @LordStras Lib Dems about to vote alone again, this time against Govt making your ISP keep a log of all your web activity. #IPBill @LordStras Same result. Labour peers (except one) voted with Tories for making all your Internet activity available to cops & many other orgs. v sad. @LordStras Labour just caved in over our attempt to increase the power of the judges who will watch over Govt snooping. That won't stop us. #IPBill LordStras @maznu Labour sided with the govt to stop more oversight. Cheers Corbyn, hope the government have fun collecting my proxy.
My quick 2p on the NHS. My daughter is now married and lives in the US. Her husband, luckily has a few $$$, but he cannot believe how we effectively get everything for 'free' (I know we pay in taxes, but you know what i mean). She recently had a baby and there were serious complications (all, thankfully ok now) and the baby had to be treated by a top surgeon at just 5 hours old for a life saving op (he was in surgery for 9 hours, so he was 14 hours old and ⅔ of his life had been spent in surgery). The surgeon was British! He used to work for the NHS and at Great Ormund Street as well! He fixed my grandson and I am forever eternally greatful, but this came at a cost of over $500,000 on insurance. Even he admitted that this would not have cost a bean in the UK - and as a UK citizen still, she could have had all the treatment here, for nothing. I will never moan about the NHS again. Yes it is not perfect and after working as an IT contractor in the public sector (not NHS) the inefficiencies frustrate the hell out of me, but I know that anyone, from any background can get the same treatment (I know for somethings there is a waiting list). We just need to bring it into the 21st century efficiency wise and maybe stop NHS tourists from milking the system. As I said, just my 2p worth.
And a very good 2p worth it is imo. This reflects my thoughts and experiences of our NHS when compared with health care in various other countries. It is not perfect anywhere and people in most countries that i visit wish that they had our service. A major burden on the NHS would appear to be too many tiers of incompetent and over paid managers, not all but too many. If this could be sorted out then the NHS efficiency would improve and existing budgets would stretch much further.
My apologies to those who work or have friends and family in NHS Human Resources but this branch of the service does very little good and an awful lot of bad in my experience. Every function of HR, from recruitment, to settling disputes, to disciplinary, could (and often is anyway) be done within the management structure of the individual faculties and departments. Every professional member of staff has their own national body to set professional standards and non-clinical staff all have line managers who, with the help (yes, help) of the unions can settle disputes. The vast number of HR staff could be redeployed to do tasks which are actually necessary.
Sorry but this is not the case. NHS Managers on the whole (not all) have no idea how to manage and without the HR support the NHS would be paying out loads of money in bullying/harassment and wrongful dismissal claims. The managers are responsible for managing their staff but they refer to HR for guidance so that unions etc should not have to start stamping their feet. HR are there to protect managers and the staff involved. Some of the managers maybe good medical people but managers they are not. They do not know employment law and are constantly wanting to do things which they should not. I don't know where you think you would redeploy HR staff to as they are qualified professionals which any decent company has within their structure. Sorry to go on but it appears you don't really understand the role of the HR staff.
After 39 years in the NHS, 25 of them as a Union rep, and later as a professional manager I know a lot about the role of HR, thank you. When I started in the mid-70's we had Personnel departments, who acted as a buffer between the staff and management. One of the many changes in the 80's was to change the role, and the name, so that HR became part of the management structure. I agree that many NHS Managers straight from university don't actually know how to manage but part of being promoted through the professional ranks is to learn that role, in fact many professions including my own insist that you gave to have a management qualification to attain a higher grade, which includes learning about employment law. Oh, and I was serious about the role of the unions too, most of the time reps are trying to ensure management stick to procedures and keep within employment law, which a good union rep will have at least as good knowledge of as the average HR person, as I have found through my own experience. Not much time to stamp our feet either, we were usually too busy doing our job.
Well I guess different parts of the NHS differ in this respect then. I stand by my statement that it would be wrong to get rid of HR. Not all managers have management qualifications some are medical people who admit they know nothing about management. Perhaps things have changed for the worse in that respect. What about all the people not in Unions? Who looks out for their rights? Calm down.You slated all HR you must have expected a response. They have their role the same as unions do.
I'm perfectly calm, thanks. The role of the unions is to protect the rights of their members, yes, and very often non-members get the same benefits as otherwise there would be chaos wih even more disputes. Obviously I would say that everyone would benefit from being in a union, but I respect anyone's right not to join, and all local and national agreements are written to protect all staff, not just union members. I did my job as a biomedical scientist and my elected role as a workplace rep side by side until I was promoted into a senior professional management post where I just wouldn't have the time to commit to the union work, so I stepped down. The biggest frustration I felt in all my years in the NHS was trying to explain to non-clinical managers, including HR, all the reasons why it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to meet government targets on productivity if we also had to make financial savings at the same time. I accept that there has to be someone who sees the bigger picture, but those people also have to listen to the staff who perform the work that directly benefits the patients.
http://blog.paddypower.com/politics/2016/10/18/paddy-power-pay-out-hillary-clinton/?AFF_ID=16562 Seems that Paddy Power have paid out on Hillary Clinton becoming President. Doesn't on the face of it seem much of a risk in light of recent events but what if something falls out of her closet in the next couple of weeks? It could get a bit dodgy.
I worked in a hospital in the early seventies that had 800 inpatients, community services attached and 1000 staff, many part time. There was one personnel manager and secretary. There was also a senior nurse who looked after nursing personnel issues. Things appeared to run fairly smoothly. 25 years later there was a 'Human Resources' Department covering the services that were essentially providing to the same population. However inpatient services were now provided on approximately 15 different sites as services moved closer to the communities they served. Community services had also increased in terms of locality bases. Just describing these services in terms of the nuts and bolts gives an idea how the pace of change within the organisation needed both macro and micro management. In my experience H.R. often provided valuable advice as the pace of change increased as all it's implications for staff needed to be addressed and resolved. However, in my experience not all advice was sound, indeed there proved to be good and not so good advice. Surprise surprise there were good and not so good H.R. officers. One thing is for sure, there are more of them!
They'll still win though because they'll benefit from all the publicity, and their liabilities won't be that great. In fact they've paid out in the past on events that didn't come to pass. If memory serves, I believe they paid out early on Chelsea to win the league one year when they got overhauled? Not sure of the year or details. PP trade very aggressively and are far from risk averse, but they certainly weigh everything they do. That's how they have grown from a very small operation to one of the Big Four bookmakers in such a short time.
I like the FM factoid that Scotland have voted by referendum to remain in Europe, and leave GB. Fair enough.
And the management consultancy bill which has spiralled to over half a billion a year now. The Tories were trying to tackle that when they first came in 2010 and it has doubled since then. Did you see that program on BBC2 last night where the NHS, Councils and other state run practices are paying massive amounts to management consultancies? Insiders from management consultancies were detailing how they wangle the business and then expand the business they do and make more money. One Council leader got a strop and stopped her interview. Birmingham council pays a billion a year to one. Well worth watching It was called "Who's spending your billions." This is the problem with politics. The party in power gets all the blame when a lot of the problems they face are the previous administrations. PFI is costing money now but was setup previously but made Labour look good back then. Clinton did the same. I'm not trying to say it is just Labour. Each administration that comes in has to deal with the results of the previous administration;s policies and it always looks bad on the current administration when the reality is often that it is the former's policies that are causing the problem. On the subject of the NHS I agree with other posters on here. The NHS is a free service that should not be catering for unnecessary cosmetic surgery, weight loss surgery or IVF. Sad but true it should be for necessary treatments and there is no doubt that there is a huge layer of waste within the whole setup just as there is in councils and everywhere else. In this so called austerity period we are in where councils and NHS and all other services are complaining about cuts they are still paying out a fortune on stuff that they should not be paying out (the created job for the resigned CEO above is one case to add to all the management consultancy fees.) There are companies and mates of mates in the public sector that are making a nice tidy earner out of the state and there has been for a long time. I'm not saying it would cover all the shortfalls or the stated efficiency targets but they need to sort this out and not just keep demanding more money to throw at the problem. IT is highly likely that of that extra £10bn (+extra they will undoubetdly give in the end) that half of it will disappear. The whole system at the moment is diverting money to the top by any means possible. PFI to investors, consultancy payments to the big name companies. Outsourcing for the sake of it at a higher price than it would cost to run it internally. Liverpool council has been one leader on this problem where they have taken their road cleaning and bin collection back in house and it is working out cheaper with less complaints from the public about the service. There is even a segment in the program where one of these firms with a contract to keep the highways safe is cutting down trees. This was the program. Watch it and try and remember it isn't just the Tories. This practice has been going on now for a couple of decades unabated and has spiralled out of control. This is your taxes. You shouldn't need to pay 1% more to fill a gap. Normal folks taxes should not be diverted to the top like they are at the moment. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0803b0s
Have you not been up North recently? Attracting all the big brand shops to the high street doesn't constitute much. The choices in many places these days is work in a shop or a coffee house or in a food processor. They might show the bigger cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle etc and all the redeveloping they do of those metropolis' but away from the big big cities it is the same as you describe of America. Decent paid jobs in engineering or steel or coal have gone and been replaced by NMW jobs for working in shops or processing your food products or bring you double latte. That is the problem in the North. All the focus is on the major cities and we have exactly the same problem here that the major cities populations are growing at an insane rate while the smaller towns are becoming ghost towns. Yay they make the city/town centre look modern but away from the city centre a lot of these towns are tumbleweed. Places that 40 years ago were thriving with real jobs are now just full of call centres and shops. Great stuff. At least the high street looks nicer. Pity all the shops are the same as every other town though. Same shops you can just go online and buy from anyway.
Tories on 47 per cent share of the vote in latest poll: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/tories-18-points-ahead-latest-poll/ Does that include the shy Tories? Have they lost their shyness now or does it mean the real % is above 50?
