The bureaucratic nature of the NHS has always been a challenge, but recent years have brought a big rise in admin for dentists.
Who could imagine that a Stalinist organisation could have too much admin paperwork?
The bureaucratic nature of the NHS has always been a challenge, but recent years have brought a big rise in admin for dentists.
Who could imagine that a Stalinist organisation could have too much admin paperwork?
It’s a political party and its cover is that it says it delivers healthcare.
I can still remember my shock at Guys Cancer Centre asking directions of a big beefy bloke with a huge beard dressed in a female nurse’s uniform. It was a few years ago, so being a naive Far Right Facist, I didn’t know about pronoun use among the cognoscenti so I just muttered “Thanks mate” and moved on.
I’m sure he’d filled in all the right forms when he claimed his uniform.
God knows what forms they were, but…
Grist, many moons ago, when new in the job, I took over from another employee, who I thought was a man. “Thanks mate”, I said. She took it as a compliment…….
NHS: A socialist behemoth with a small country attached.
Is it any different from the galloping bureaucracy that infests any government-controlled organisation?
A good friend, the enthusiastic and dedicated headmaster (if one may be allowed to use such a sexist term) of a very well respected local school eventually was driven into early retirement by the daily deluge of near-irrelevant documentation that arrived on his desk. His stated reason?.. “I went into the profession to teach children, not spend all day filling in f*****g forms!”.
What jgh said
I’d still like to know whether Toni Blair had it in for dentists and why he drove the NHS dental service into a collapse across swathes of the country.
Was it willed or a result of sheer ignorance and incompetence?
Baron,
“Is it any different from the galloping bureaucracy that infests any government-controlled organisation?”
Even by government standards, the NHS is the absolute worst. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s the size. So many people, so many levels. Also too much money sloshing around, and when you get that, people will gold plate every procedure. So rather than just going to Halfords to buy some £200 Sat Navs for nurses, you have to write a procurement document the size of the Mahabharata, which leads to spending £600 for them from Crapita.
I have been that person from Crapita. It’s wasn’t Crapita, but similar.
We were doing the back end processing of data collected by a medical device, in out data centres . I can’t go into what it was, but it involved children and the correct processing of this data would allow surgeons to make positive life changing decisions for these kids. It was groundbreaking, and I enjoyed managing that project.
Then we were ready to roll out. I know this sounds a bit “and?” but we had sorted the application and coms between the NHS net and ourselves (this was back during New Labour) so all we needed to do was plug the device into the NHS pcs, right click on the desktop, new short cut, type in the internal URL, OK, OK, save. And they were done.
After numerous, endless, meetings it emerged their IT staff weren’t prepared to do this. I took one of their senior guys aside and pointed out that if they didn’t, our lot would jump on the chance to charge the NHS day rates to do this, which would be around £250/pc. Remember, this is 2000’s money. They didn’t give a shit.
I got a huge bonus because we rolled out with trusts faxing us lists of available pcs and us sending guys on minimum wage to create a fucking desktop shortcut. Hundreds of thousands of pounds.
OT but very worrying.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/solar-flare-storm-effects-planet-earth-uk/
Solar storm: why the next disaster to strike will come from the sun
Obviously something must be done. But will that involve mandatory wearing of sun tan lotion? Or will sun tan lotion be banned altogether? Will mask wearing be advisable or obligatory? Lock-ins for sunny days? No doubt gatherings of sunbathers of more than two will outlawed & 2 metres distance must be preserved at all times.
BiS. I’d advocate my favourite solution, burn lots more coal. The good old London peasouper should protect us all from this frightful disaster.
Of course the solar flares would mean the poor girls can’t be chatting on the damn phone all the time.
There was one NHS IT contract I was on where a random bit of paperwork showed that they were paying £799 a week for £456 to get into my pocket.
In another contract I was working for Addecco who hired me to Highlander who hired me to Capita who hired me to the local council. Glod knows what the money flow was in that one.
No doubt gatherings of sunbathers of more than two will outlawed & 2 metres distance must be preserved at all times.
Only when they start combusting spontaneously
I work for the NHS, front line, allied health professional.
The main local hospital is falling down due to RAAC. I tried to use one of the hot desks they have set up to make best use of space. The computer wasn’t working. Easy to diagnose, a missing cable. I asked IT for a replacement, they wouldn’t provide it without a non standard equipment requisition form from my manager. My manager won’t do this because other departments use the computers.
About a third of the hot desk computers are not working because of faulty or missing equipment and short of buying the replacement parts myself, which I have been expressly forbidden to do there doesn’t appear to be any way to get them working.
Can’t be privatised soon enough.
@BiS From the article:
Earth-Sun distance is 8.3 light-minutes on average.. If Anything is ejected from the Sun at us at “near-lightspeed” , we’d have at best….. 10 minutes.. before it hits us, and about a minute to actually detect it from any light emitted before whatever event it is becomes part of History. ( or proves to be a wet squib…)
As poetic as the article is… This is why we don’t let Arts Graduates near important equipment. Or actual scientific articles.
Their poor fuzzy brains can’t handle the data..
Much of what the Sun throws at us travels at nowhere near light speed, and takes up to a day to reach us.
I wouldn’t have thought the accuracy of the article was the point. It’s the running of yet another scare & doom story to induce fear in the public. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to tie it into the grocer boy’s wish to roll back on Net Zero.
It may be “news” but for a very low value of new. The Torygraph could have run the article any time in the past three & a half billion years. Although maybe the single celled plant life it employs for journalists have only just got round to it.
Daniel
Buy a cable and take it home with you each night.
Another annoying feature is that one can no longer just nip out to PcWorld or Maplins and get stuff anymore.
the equivalent of 17 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs exploding at once
So? As we are all aware, the carbon emissions of 70 million people on the edge of the European continent have a far more powerful effect than the sun.
“I wouldn’t have thought the accuracy of the article was the point. It’s the running of yet another scare & doom story to induce fear in the public. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to tie it into the grocer boy’s wish to roll back on Net Zero.”
A CME isn’t much use as a bogey man, preparing for one doesn’t really involve changing the masses behaviours. It would involve the authorities actually doing some real work instead, which as we all know isn’t the point of bogey men. I mean it doesn’t matter how much electric the masses use, or how its generated, if we have a power grid then CME preparations require it to be protected, and supplies of replacement parts stored ready. And their actions would then be tested by reality, eventually. None of this is what the PTB want out of a bogey man, which is more power over the masses for themselves. Its just work, work that will be marked and graded. So f*ck that………
Oh come now Jim. The majority of people won’t get more than two paragraphs into what follows it. It’s not just arts graduates are thick. The majority of the public don’t exactly shine. Why they get taken in by so much bollocks appears in newspapers & on the box. The knowledge of most people isn’t much greater than it was a few centuries ago. Hence aromatherapy & crystal healing.. The key words in the article were the next disaster to strike will come from the sun
Actually, I’ll take that back. People were more knowledgeable a few centuries ago because they’d had some real life experience to learn from. Something that’s mostly absent now.
“The key words in the article were the next disaster to strike will come from the sun”
Yes, but how does that translate into ‘So we (the PTB) must now force you to all do X’? There’s nothing that we on Earth can do to stop a CME from hitting us , just arrange our affairs in a way so that when that happens the consequences aren’t utterly catastrophic. Thats why ‘climate change’ is such a great idea (for the PTB) because its all our fault and can be reversed if we do as we are told. A CME hitting Earth doesn’t have even a semblance of our culpability or even superficial reversibility. So using it as a bogey man seems unlikely IMO.
“Yes, but how does that translate into ‘So we (the PTB) must now force you to all do X’?”
Because they’ve cultivated a belief that government is the answer to every problem. So this must be yet another problem government is the answer to.
Some math: 2pi x 90,000,000/ “a vast ball of plasma several times larger than the earth itself ” = a very tiny number. And that’s just for the earth’s orbital plane. The sun’s a sphere. Sure a ‘Carrington Event’ would be pretty scary. But the last one was in 1859. Are there historical records of the one before that?
“Because they’ve cultivated a belief that government is the answer to every problem. So this must be yet another problem government is the answer to.”
OK, so what policy are they going to demand we all adhere to because of a potential CME? Climate Change is easy – you must use less energy, consume less. There’s an internal logic to the demand – CO2 is rising, temperatures are going up, one causes the other ergo we must all reduce emissions. But what could be demanded of the public to prevent or mitigate a CME hitting earth? More taxes to pay for mitigation? Unlikely – if they could raise more taxes they already would have, there’s plenty of other things they want to spend money on. And anyway any extra taxes raise by a CME tax would then have to be spent on CME work, it doesn’t give them any extra money to throw at their usual targets.
I just can’t see an obvious easy route by which raising a CME bogey man gives the PTB any more power over us, or any even vaguely superficially plausible argument that they should have more power.
“Are there historical records of the one before that?”
There is evidence of so called Miyake events, when the earth was bombarded by high density cosmic rays which left a mark in trees growing at the time. One was discovered recently in logs used to build a Viking long house and was dated to 993AD.
https://www.science.org/content/article/marking-time-cosmic-ray-storms-can-pin-precise-dates-history-ancient-egypt-vikings
Another event was pinpointed at 774AD, which also coincides with reports in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of unusual auras in the sky, which would suggest some sort of heavy cosmic ray bombardment of the planet at that time.
Looking at the timeline of such events that have been discovered it seems that they happen in clumps, often 2 or 3 within a 2-300 year period, then a large gap of a 1000 years or more. So given the last recorded one is over a 1000 years ago, we could be due for another.