"1. The NHS payment system is complicated. Hospitals get ‘paid’ with government funds for each case or procedure they perform. ... 2. But private providers deliberately target stand-alone, ‘profitable’ services that are quick and straightforward, like orthopaedics."
That old chestnut again. It really is the most spectacularly stupid argument. Who sets the fixed NHS prices? If some standalone services are more profitable than others - hip replacements rather than A+E, for example - then what does that tell you? How hard is it to understand that it tells you that the NHS fixed prices for hip replacements are too high, and therefore hip replacements in the NHS are inefficient? The solution, as used in virtually every other field of human endeavour is a market with open price discovery - you need MORE, not less, privatisation, combined with bidding on price, to improve efficiency.
Sorry I can understand why you’d think that but it’s not true. The key thing to understand is that the NHS underwrites all healthcare in the U.K. (if anything goes wrong in a private hospital that basically ring 999) so it’s overheads are higher.
The stuff that private providers do for the NHS is the cheap, easy stuff. And that’s good in theory - they can scale it, compete, and focus on it. But you’ll never have useful competition.
My son is seeing a consultant tomorrow - he saw a consultant previously.
A consultant is cheap easy stuff?
Again - I am pleased to not have to wait for what I am told is an urgent appointment.
But to some you'll be a rich bastard who's able to jump the queue. I share your values.
The NHS is paying.
I did however pay for another private appointment for a second opinion whilst this guy was off sick
Does each of them refer their NHS patients to see the other consultant on the private?
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource.
In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold:
1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way.
2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways:
Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally.
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
An excellent summation of the kind of problems that I experience in the NHS. I try to monitor my own problem issues and take responsibility for those areas where I can, but most seem to abdicate any responsibility for their health problems. The NHS needs an overhaul to bring it up to date.
Your post deserves a wider audience than it's getting now.
Con 39 (-3) Lab 35 (+1) LD 13 (+1) TBP 3 (-1) Gre 3 (-1)
7th - 9th December 2019
Changes from 5-6 Dec
But no idea where this has come from as it's not officially up on the Yougov archive (though I guess it's not difficult to find the url). The formatting seems odd too.
It's gone.
Somebody will probably circulate a fake MRP tomorrow at 10pm :-)
"1. The NHS payment system is complicated. Hospitals get ‘paid’ with government funds for each case or procedure they perform. ... 2. But private providers deliberately target stand-alone, ‘profitable’ services that are quick and straightforward, like orthopaedics."
That old chestnut again. It really is the most spectacularly stupid argument. Who sets the fixed NHS prices? If some standalone services are more profitable than others - hip replacements rather than A+E, for example - then what does that tell you? How hard is it to understand that it tells you that the NHS fixed prices for hip replacements are too high, and therefore hip replacements in the NHS are inefficient? The solution, as used in virtually every other field of human endeavour is a market with open price discovery - you need MORE, not less, privatisation, combined with bidding on price, to improve efficiency.
Sorry I can understand why you’d think that but it’s not true. The key thing to understand is that the NHS underwrites all healthcare in the U.K. (if anything goes wrong in a private hospital that basically ring 999) so it’s overheads are higher.
The stuff that private providers do for the NHS is the cheap, easy stuff. And that’s good in theory - they can scale it, compete, and focus on it. But you’ll never have useful competition.
Again - I am pleased to not have to wait for what I am told is an urgent appointment.
Yes, basically. A consultation is predictable and relatively easy.
So why can't the NHS handle it?
It can. We ration by waiting time where there are capacity issues. Some countries ration by cost, we ration by time.
Time is money. Or have I got that wrong?
Yes.
Let’s say you have ear-wax buildup-us. We decide to run a capacity level that allows you to be treated within three months. We do this because there are peaks and troughs (it’s seasonal).
To let you be treated next week, we would need more widgets and widget operators; and because demand fluctuates they’d be under occupied some of the time and cost us money.
We “charge” you time to save us “ultimately taxpayers” money.
I don't have a problem giving you ear wax. I didn't read on.
Con 39 (-3) Lab 35 (+1) LD 13 (+1) TBP 3 (-1) Gre 3 (-1)
7th - 9th December 2019
Changes from 5-6 Dec
But no idea where this has come from as it's not officially up on the Yougov archive (though I guess it's not difficult to find the url). The formatting seems odd too.
It's gone.
Somebody will probably circulate a fake MRP tomorrow at 10pm :-)
Okay folks I’ve worked out what’s happened re the YouGov .
Someone has faked the headline voter intention , the rest of the poll numbers as in demographics etc are exactly the same as the one released at the weekend.
Rob D got there first ! lol but these types of fake polls can cause currency fluctuations .
Very weird . That so called YouGov . If you look at the cross tabs . It would be impossible for Labour to be just 4 points behind .
That's cause the cross-tabs are the same as the previous poll, only the headline numbers were faked.
Yeah I started putting the raw numbers into my database and they were all the same as the last ones. The lengths some people will go to to fake a poll, eh.
Okay folks I’ve worked out what’s happened re the YouGov .
Someone has faked the headline voter intention , the rest of the poll numbers as in demographics etc are exactly the same as the one released at the weekend .
Very weird . That so called YouGov . If you look at the cross tabs . It would be impossible for Labour to be just 4 points behind .
That's cause the cross-tabs are the same as the previous poll, only the headline numbers were faked.
Yeah I started putting the raw numbers into my database and they were all the same as the last ones. The lengths some people will go to to fake a poll, eh.
Clever thing about that Love Actually vid is how is segues from the last one they put out. Double the whammy from every view.
Hospital floors - when your man puts out fakenews tweets about having to sit on the floor of a train that was actually empty, I’m not sure you have much right to be morally outraged when people are sceptical of a similar photo coming out 3 days before an election.
Why is it by the way the hard left think they have a monopoly on morality? Do you genuinely think any PM goes into the job thinking, “you know what I wanna do? Force sick kids to sleep on the floor”? It’s such facile tribalism. Grow up.
Okay folks I’ve worked out what’s happened re the YouGov .
Someone has faked the headline voter intention , the rest of the poll numbers as in demographics etc are exactly the same as the one released at the weekend.
Rob D got there first ! lol but these types of fake polls can cause currency fluctuations .
I thought it was a fake. No poll has put the Tories under 40% for a long time.
Some of the money is certainly misallocated, but I have never argued that the problems of the NHS are purely, or even predominantly financial.
Thanks. I am v interested to hear your thoughts but perhaps another day not at midnight.
Long post, sorry.
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold:
1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way.
2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways:
Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally.
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
Thanks for this On your point about "integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time", do Children's Hospitals work any better given that they have a wide range of specialists within the one organisation?
To be 100% clear: you watched that video and thought to yourself, "I must defend the obnoxious shouty man hurling abuse"?
"You are not welcome in this country"
A real hatemonger there.
Yesterday we were told to wear badges to indicate we voted Tory. Perhaps the new plan is to deport us. Madagascar?
The experience of Tories in the UK is absolutely nothing like the experience of Jews in early 1930s Germany. It is offensive and crass to make that parallel.
Some of the money is certainly misallocated, but I have never argued that the problems of the NHS are purely, or even predominantly financial.
Thanks. I am v interested to hear your thoughts but perhaps another day not at midnight.
Long post, sorry.
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold:
1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way.
2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways:
Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally.
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
Thanks for this On your point about "integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time", do Children's Hospitals work any better given that they have a wide range of specialists within the one organisation?
Paeds is the one area I’ve not worked. But I don’t think it is particularly better than elsewhere - and to all intents and purposes having a range of specialists under one roof makes it similar to an adult district general hospital.
He ranted and raged at the Health Secretary for doing his job and visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm.
Disgraceful behaviour from the hard left
The guy shouted his disagreements. That's what demonstrators do. On all sides. You can criticise his words or tone, sure. I don't agree with his approach either.
But you @HYUFD watched that video and now you're wriggling to justify. (Just as Laura Kuennesberg for not checking properly before pouring out fakes to millions. I'm not suggesting you carry the same burden or expectation as them, but...)
... can you at least bring yourself to acknowledge that it was untrue that the guy punched or even assaulted or did anything physical to the Tory guy?
Rather than trying to compound your mistake by your devious words '...visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm."
That is vile disingenuity in the extreme. You've become part of the problem you complain of.
The people on here who are voting Con, what do you feel about supporting a PM and party who today:
- Got 'senior party members' to lie to top journalists Kuenssberg and Peston, who then spread that lie around the world: that a Lab campaigner 'punched' a Tory ministers staff... (the video shows someone bumped lightly into an outstretched hand!) - Continued with their numerous fake 'campaign group' Facebook sites to avoid advertising restrictions/scrutiny - Purchased slots and designs to pretend to be the Labour manifesto website so as to lie and subvert the vote of those who didn't understand (and there are many, but everyone has a vote) - Set bots to send identical messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of people pretending to be a friend of a staff member (at a mis-named) 'Leeds Hospital' to counter the story of Boris Johnson weirdly taking a journalist's phone and handling the questions badly when asked about a boy there who (the hospital admitted) had no bed (for which they apologised)?
Those supporting Johnson because they criticise Corbyn for AS, you have some nerve, or are utterly blinkered: how can you bring yourself to support Johnson who insisted on publishing his friends vile anti-semitic articles about the 'global Jewish conspiracy' in 2001 whilst he was editor at the Spectator, against protestations, and refused to apologise.
I'm not fan of LD Lab or Corbyn, but they pale into insignificance compared to Johnson and his current Tories. I'm voting Green in a safe Lab seat. I'd vote tactically at this election for protecting our climate and biosphere and against the insane and dangerous Tories. I prefer proportional representation - with single member seats combined. When an election is won on only a few thousand votes and in most seats the majority of voters votes are meaningless, the system is dead.
A hung parliament is the only way. But only Lab has even started to address the most significant currently-known threat to our species existence (since policy can only be made on the best evidence we have, and the best evidence we have is clear and demands instant urgent action), and that trumps everything (no pun intended The Tories have nothing to offer there.
p.s. Regarding the hospital photo, the parent may not want to be in the public eye, or for their child, but that's a bit tough, inescapable, if you send photos to a newspaper.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
To be 100% clear: you watched that video and thought to yourself, "I must defend the obnoxious shouty man hurling abuse"?
Facts are actual things, you're not supposed to just decide on them based on who you like.
Not taking a position on the video, which I have not seen, but I would challenge the blanket statement that facts are actual things.
There are stimuli from the external environment to which we attach meaning based on our world view and experience. These interpretations are only really elevated to the status of 'facts' if we all agree on their meaning - as for the most part we do in the hard sciences. But even what is 'fact' in physics has changed many times over the course of that science's development.
Maybe theoretical mathematics is the only place where there are immutable facts because they are provable from the chosen axioms. But even there, I would hazard that there was a time when it was a 'fact' that there is no such thing as the square root of -1.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
Noise to signal ratio not great right now. I'm diligently reading every post still, waiting to see the 2019 equivalent of the Herdson 2017 bombshell.
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource.
In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold:
1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way.
2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways:
Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally.
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
Excellent post I work in systems safety, and face the same issues - silos and lack of integration.
He ranted and raged at the Health Secretary for doing his job and visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm.
Disgraceful behaviour from the hard left
The guy shouted his disagreements. That's what demonstrators do. On all sides. You can criticise his words or tone, sure. I don't agree with his approach either.
But you @HYUFD watched that video and now you're wriggling to justify. (Just as Laura Kuennesberg for not checking properly before pouring out fakes to millions. I'm not suggesting you carry the same burden or expectation as them, but...)
... can you at least bring yourself to acknowledge that it was untrue that the guy punched or even assaulted or did anything physical to the Tory guy?
Rather than trying to compound your mistake by your devious words '...visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm."
That is vile disingenuity in the extreme. You've become part of the problem you complain of.
HY simply does not do “I was wrong”. He would be too busy.
Gotta be honest as a Lib Dem the three updated constituency polls in London are really bad. Instead of squeezing the Labour vote we have gone backwards in two seats. Looks like the tactical voting message is not getting through. I am way out West so not involved in the London campaign but it does not look good for Thursday with probably only Richmond Park and just possibly Finchley & Golders Green in play.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
Sadly Farron misjudged his pitch to that demographic.
Gotta be honest as a Lib Dem the three updated constituency polls in London are really bad. Instead of squeezing the Labour vote we have gone backwards in two seats. Looks like the tactical voting message is not getting through. I am way out West so not involved in the London campaign but it does not look good for Thursday with probably only Richmond Park and just possibly Finchley & Golders Green in play.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
He ranted and raged at the Health Secretary for doing his job and visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm.
Disgraceful behaviour from the hard left
There d their didn't seem much physical contact in the clip but the bloke in the high vis jacket with the bike is clearly a cunt.
From that video it was a case of ball to arm, not arm to ball. But the protester is rather odious, and the whole episode reflects badly on all parties.
Indeed, and I do not regard either Labour or the Tories as worthy of a vote.
But in this particular case you have, on the one hand, a protester - and on the other, a party officially briefing journalists with what they know are lies. And their supporters here still trying to justify the lies after they have shown to be so.
Long post, sorry. I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England. I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource. In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower. The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful). The problems are two-fold: 1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way. 2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways: Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally. Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff. The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed. The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention. But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
To be 100% clear: you watched that video and thought to yourself, "I must defend the obnoxious shouty man hurling abuse"?
Facts are actual things, you're not supposed to just decide on them based on who you like.
Not taking a position on the video, which I have not seen, but I would challenge the blanket statement that facts are actual things.
There are stimuli from the external environment to which we attach meaning based on our world view and experience. These interpretations are only really elevated to the status of 'facts' if we all agree on their meaning - as for the most part we do in the hard sciences. But even what is 'fact' in physics has changed many times over the course of that science's development.
Maybe theoretical mathematics is the only place where there are immutable facts because they are provable from the chosen axioms. But even there, I would hazard that there was a time when it was a 'fact' that there is no such thing as the square root of -1.
There was a time when there was no such thing as -1.
Some of the money is certainly misallocated, but I have never argued that the problems of the NHS are purely, or even predominantly financial.
Thanks. I am v interested to hear your thoughts but perhaps another day not at midnight.
Long post, sorry.
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource.
In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
Certainly some money is needed for infrastructure. My own hospital is one of the six getting funding for an extensive rebuild.
I agree about surge capacity, and its consequent impact on elective provision. Running at bed occupancy rates in the high nineties is far higher than comparable systems on the continent.
The source for me saying the high cost of care in the final year is a myth is this:
He ranted and raged at the Health Secretary for doing his job and visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm.
Disgraceful behaviour from the hard left
There d their didn't seem much physical contact in the clip but the bloke in the high vis jacket with the bike is clearly a cunt.
From that video it was a case of ball to arm, not arm to ball. But the protester is rather odious, and the whole episode reflects badly on all parties.
Indeed, and I do not regard either Labour or the Tories as worthy of a vote.
But in this particular case you have, on the one hand, a protester - and on the other, a party officially briefing journalists with what they know are lies. And their supporters here still trying to justify the lies after they have shown to be so.
Supporters of football teams will argue until they are blue in the face that the disallowed goal clearly shown to be offside should not have been disallowed. They'll say that their striker did not dive in the penalty box even when the replays show clearly that he did. In the same way, supporters of Tory FC will never, ever acknowledge - even in the face of clear, inarguable evidence - that their team did anything wrong.
Long post, sorry. I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England. I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource. In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower. The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful). The problems are two-fold:
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
The problem for emergency departmentsis not so much the front door (though that indeed is getting busier) but the backdoor. They cannot get patients admitted to an inpatient bed until one is availible. Simultaneously around 20% of medical inpatients are waiting on arrangements for discharge to social care. The latter backs up the whole system.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
Long post, sorry. I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England. I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource. In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower. The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful). The problems are two-fold:
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
The problem for emergency departmentsis not so much the front door (though that indeed is getting busier) but the backdoor. They cannot get patients admitted to an inpatient bed until one is availible. Simultaneously around 20% of medical inpatients are waiting on arrangements for discharge to social care. The latter backs up the whole system.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
So they should build capacity for social care not more hospitals?
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention. But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
With social care, it's a societal problem more than a money one in the strictest sense. Most nations around the world outsource the majority of social care to the family unit. For some reason in the UK this is not so typical. But further, no one wants to pay for this work to be taken up by the state instead, witness May's election result.
As for health care itself, I'm no doctor but it seems to me that the "prevention" model of healthcare is very difficult in the British system because there is an inbuilt moral hazard. There's no reward / incentive for living healthily and scant punishment for living badly - some moderate sin taxes on booze and fags (which suffer widescale smuggling) and a few pennies on sugar. The polluter also barely pays (some scant petrol taxes).
The £9 per item subscription charge is also a clumsy and regressive way of making primary healthcare more economically efficient. Far better to charge per GP appointment.
But it's hard for British politicians to go anywhere near this stuff because you get people losing their mind at you.
Illumina are still promising a DNA decoder on every GPs desk to sequence genomes at US$100 per go. Perhaps this is when things will really change. Hopefully it will trigger a shift in cultural mindset so that people choose to take charge of their own wellbeing rather than expecting Nanny do everything for them. I'm not holding my breath though.
Gotta be honest as a Lib Dem the three updated constituency polls in London are really bad. Instead of squeezing the Labour vote we have gone backwards in two seats. Looks like the tactical voting message is not getting through. I am way out West so not involved in the London campaign but it does not look good for Thursday with probably only Richmond Park and just possibly Finchley & Golders Green in play.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
It would be extraordinary (but far from impossible) for the LDs to double their vote share (to 14.6% nationwide) but see their seats slip back.
The issue they have is that: - LD/Lab marginals are almost entirely University seats where belief in Corbyn remains strong - There are a number of LD Leave seats that are vulnerable (Eastbourne & North Norfolk) - The SNP's vote share is up as much as their's in Scotland, and all of their seats there (except O&S) are marginal - They look to fall just short in a swathe of Remainia
Except the LibDems aren't doubling their vote share - it looks to be a rise of closer to half of that now. The latest Survation and Deltapolls both have them on 11% - and they haven't reached 15% with any pollster where any part of the polling was done in December. That shows their direction of travel.
My take? None of their party switchers will get re-elected. Come Friday, they may be looking for a new leader from a very limited talent pool.
Scotland - looking very troubling for them. SW - maybe they will take St. Ives - because it's far-flung Cornwall and they are contrarians. But Revoke and Swinson play badly there, as anywhere. I think the Cons will now hold N. Cornwall and N. Devon. Cheltenham - no longer a given for them. But Bath looks safe. Midlands - where the squeeze between the big two leaves them most irrelevent Wales - can't see them having more than one seat on Friday East - North Norfolk is a Con Gain. Cambridge stays Labour NW - Southport in the Cons column SE - Eastbourne a sneaked Con win London Remainia - Zac will lose - but he's coming back fast, so by nowhere near as much as looked the case a few weeks ago.
Everywhere else, the LibDems will flatter to deceive.
Mmm, a Doha based individual who appears to like trying to take down the Tories.
Boris made a small error in the live interview with the phone. But overall, its clearly a set up job involving the parents and Mirror to weaponise the NHS, just as the left try every election.
Late to the party on Delta Poll Constituencies. They along with the Welsh poll seem to back Survation report, ICM looks very out of kilter. So I'm struggling to understand the movement of a Tory majority on betfair from 1.24 to 1.34 over the last twenty four hours?
Late to the party on Delta Poll Constituencies. They along with the Welsh poll seem to back Survation report, ICM looks very out of kilter. So I'm struggling to understand the movement of a Tory majority on betfair from 1.24 to 1.34 over the last twenty four hours?
Mmm, a Doha based individual who appears to like trying to take down the Tories.
Boris made a small error in the live interview with the phone. But overall, its clearly a set up job involving the parents and Mirror to weaponise the NHS, just as the left try every election.
Where are we now, 48 hours or so to save the NHS?
It's interesting that you associate the attempts to smear the parents of the child with the Tories. The professor of digital informaiton you seek to disparage doesn't, of course.
I hope the truth will out so that arseholes on both sides can accept it. Won't happen.
Purdah rules presumably mean all the hospital can do is take it on face value and issue an apology. But after the election, once an investigation has been carried out, they'll be free to set the record straight one way or another.
Purdah rules don’t apply to hospitals . The hospital has confirmed the journalists report . I can’t believe purdah is now being brought into this !
Not quite
The apology I saw was that there was an apology there was no bed in the treatment room
AIUI (not a medical professional) pneumonia would largely be treated on an outpatient basis rather than requiring hospitalisation
So it’s a reasonable judgement by the hospital to say this patient doesn’t need to lie down they can use the room without a bed” - they are essentially figuring out how to optimise the use of limited capacity
Unfortunately the kid then got tired and wanted to rest and the rest is history
So: reasonable judgement leading to a sub optimal outcome. Image used to tell a political story which they don’t fully support.
How lies are spread. I am sure all sides do it. It is terrifying ...
It truly is terrifying. This country is screwed. We're in Trump-world now.
All sides do it. That is the most frightening part. It's hard to know how you combat it. Facebook is not something I am a part of so I don't see any of this. But it is clearly immmensely powerful. In the end, people will believe what they want to believe. I am as guilty of that as anyone. In the end, I suppose, the only defence to fake news is self awareness.
Late to the party on Delta Poll Constituencies. They along with the Welsh poll seem to back Survation report, ICM looks very out of kilter. So I'm struggling to understand the movement of a Tory majority on betfair from 1.24 to 1.34 over the last twenty four hours?
The NHS.
Amazing value at 1.34 in that case. A single incident is just that. It would take showing hundreds of children in the same situation to be moving my money to a hung parliament.
Long post, sorry. I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England. I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource. In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower. The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful). The problems are two-fold:
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
The problem for emergency departmentsis not so much the front door (though that indeed is getting busier) but the backdoor. They cannot get patients admitted to an inpatient bed until one is availible. Simultaneously around 20% of medical inpatients are waiting on arrangements for discharge to social care. The latter backs up the whole system.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
Agree entirely. Social care provision is a key bottleneck that impedes smooth flow through the whole system. There simply isn’t enough of it - despite the fact it looks after 3x as many people per day as the NHS does.
In our local system, winter pressures (ha, misnomer as it’s all year round now) focus is on two things - getting senior clinical decision makers to the front door to ensure speedy diagnosis and divert patients who don’t need/shouldn’t be in hospital; and ensuring smooth flow out of hospital into home/social care. This requires real partnership working - which the organisational barriers don’t;t always
By and large the flow works ok and can cope with statistically normal variation in demand. But the slightest hiccough (an outbreak of of a vomiting bug on a community hospital ward for example) and the whole system clogs up and can take days to recover.
Use of the private sector is fundamental - it already provides much of our social care capacity, and is capable of vital surge capacity or ring-fences planned capacity that helps to ensure routine operations can continue.
Those who would deny all private sector involvement in care simply don’t understand the cost-effective role it can play in keeping the whole system running.
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
The problem for emergency departmentsis not so much the front door (though that indeed is getting busier) but the backdoor. They cannot get patients admitted to an inpatient bed until one is availible. Simultaneously around 20% of medical inpatients are waiting on arrangements for discharge to social care. The latter backs up the whole system.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
Agree entirely. Social care provision is a key bottleneck that impedes smooth flow through the whole system. There simply isn’t enough of it - despite the fact it looks after 3x as many people per day as the NHS does.
In our local system, winter pressures (ha, misnomer as it’s all year round now) focus is on two things - getting senior clinical decision makers to the front door to ensure speedy diagnosis and divert patients who don’t need/shouldn’t be in hospital; and ensuring smooth flow out of hospital into home/social care. This requires real partnership working - which the organisational barriers don’t;t always
By and large the flow works ok and can cope with statistically normal variation in demand. But the slightest hiccough (an outbreak of of a vomiting bug on a community hospital ward for example) and the whole system clogs up and can take days to recover.
Use of the private sector is fundamental - it already provides much of our social care capacity, and is capable of vital surge capacity or ring-fences planned capacity that helps to ensure routine operations can continue.
Those who would deny all private sector involvement in care simply don’t understand the cost-effective role it can play in keeping the whole system running.
So in National Grid terms, the NHS is the baseload from nuclear, Drax, distributed wind etc... but from time to time surge power is needed and for that we turn to more expensive under capacity gas peaker plants (the private healthcare sector).
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
It is tedious, but one must try one's best to ignore it and remember that they'll be gone in another couple of days.
Gotta be honest as a Lib Dem the three updated constituency polls in London are really bad. Instead of squeezing the Labour vote we have gone backwards in two seats. Looks like the tactical voting message is not getting through. I am way out West so not involved in the London campaign but it does not look good for Thursday with probably only Richmond Park and just possibly Finchley & Golders Green in play.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
There are probably a good deal more of us around than that. Figures regarding the proportion of non-hetero persons in the population are always contentious, primarily because they're bound to be skewed by the relative willingness or reluctance of the respondents in surveys to come out in the first place.
Most obviously amongst the ONS figures, the percentage of people stating that they're LGB is about 4% amongst the under 25's. Does that mean that the British population is getting more gay over time, or simply that the overall 2% figure means that people are more likely still to be hiding in the back of the closet the older they are? I know what common sense tells me.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
It is tedious, but one must try one's best to ignore it and remember that they'll be gone in another couple of days.
Gotta be honest as a Lib Dem the three updated constituency polls in London are really bad. Instead of squeezing the Labour vote we have gone backwards in two seats. Looks like the tactical voting message is not getting through. I am way out West so not involved in the London campaign but it does not look good for Thursday with probably only Richmond Park and just possibly Finchley & Golders Green in play.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
There are probably a good deal more of us around than that. Figures regarding the proportion of non-hetero persons in the population are always contentious, primarily because they're bound to be skewed by the relative willingness or reluctance of the respondents in surveys to come out in the first place.
Most obviously amongst the ONS figures, the percentage of people stating that they're LGB is about 4% amongst the under 25's. Does that mean that the British population is getting more gay over time, or simply that the overall 2% figure means that people are more likely still to be hiding in the back of the closet the older they are? I know what common sense tells me.
How ‘classic PB’ to spiral off into a discussion of demographic statistics, when the OP’s original statement was about “interest in gay sex”!
Maybe you’d do better looking to dig out some viewing statistics from popular porn sites?
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
The problem for emergency departmentsis not so much the front door (though that indeed is getting busier) but the backdoor. They cannot get patients admitted to an inpatient bed until one is availible. Simultaneously around 20% of medical inpatients are waiting on arrangements for discharge to social care. The latter backs up the whole system.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
Agree entirely. Social care provision is a key bottleneck that impedes smooth flow through the whole system. There simply isn’t enough of it - despite the fact it looks after 3x as many people per day as the NHS does.
In our local system, winter pressures (ha, misnomer as it’s all year round now) focus is on two things - getting senior clinical decision makers to the front door to ensure speedy diagnosis and divert patients who don’t need/shouldn’t be in hospital; and ensuring smooth flow out of hospital into home/social care. This requires real partnership working - which the organisational barriers don’t;t always
By and large the flow works ok and can cope with statistically normal variation in demand. But the slightest hiccough (an outbreak of of a vomiting bug on a community hospital ward for example) and the whole system clogs up and can take days to recover.
Use of the private sector is fundamental - it already provides much of our social care capacity, and is capable of vital surge capacity or ring-fences planned capacity that helps to ensure routine operations can continue.
Those who would deny all private sector involvement in care simply don’t understand the cost-effective role it can play in keeping the whole system running.
So in National Grid terms, the NHS is the baseload from nuclear, Drax, distributed wind etc... but from time to time surge power is needed and for that we turn to more expensive under capacity gas peaker plants (the private healthcare sector).
Though almost certainly we do not have the base load capacity that we need:
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention. But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
With social care, it's a societal problem more than a money one in the strictest sense. Most nations around the world outsource the majority of social care to the family unit. For some reason in the UK this is not so typical. But further, no one wants to pay for this work to be taken up by the state instead, witness May's election result.
As for health care itself, I'm no doctor but it seems to me that the "prevention" model of healthcare is very difficult in the British system because there is an inbuilt moral hazard. There's no reward / incentive for living healthily and scant punishment for living badly - some moderate sin taxes on booze and fags (which suffer widescale smuggling) and a few pennies on sugar. The polluter also barely pays (some scant petrol taxes).
The £9 per item subscription charge is also a clumsy and regressive way of making primary healthcare more economically efficient. Far better to charge per GP appointment.
But it's hard for British politicians to go anywhere near this stuff because you get people losing their mind at you.
Illumina are still promising a DNA decoder on every GPs desk to sequence genomes at US$100 per go. Perhaps this is when things will really change. Hopefully it will trigger a shift in cultural mindset so that people choose to take charge of their own wellbeing rather than expecting Nanny do everything for them. I'm not holding my breath though.
Agree re. social care and moral hazards in the system.
But baffled why you think sequencing genomes would improve anything.
The biggest killer in the UK, and virtually everywhere else, is cardiovascular disease. How much time do we spend talking about that particular killer, rather than say cancer?
We don't need to sequence a genome to know that cutting out the fags, booze and losing weight would dramatically improve the nation's health. But moral hazard.
An interesting and informative post. Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded. The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
Agree entirely. Social care provision is a key bottleneck that impedes smooth flow through the whole system. There simply isn’t enough of it - despite the fact it looks after 3x as many people per day as the NHS does.
In our local system, winter pressures (ha, misnomer as it’s all year round now) focus is on two things - getting senior clinical decision makers to the front door to ensure speedy diagnosis and divert patients who don’t need/shouldn’t be in hospital; and ensuring smooth flow out of hospital into home/social care. This requires real partnership working - which the organisational barriers don’t;t always
By and large the flow works ok and can cope with statistically normal variation in demand. But the slightest hiccough (an outbreak of of a vomiting bug on a community hospital ward for example) and the whole system clogs up and can take days to recover.
Use of the private sector is fundamental - it already provides much of our social care capacity, and is capable of vital surge capacity or ring-fences planned capacity that helps to ensure routine operations can continue.
Those who would deny all private sector involvement in care simply don’t understand the cost-effective role it can play in keeping the whole system running.
So in National Grid terms, the NHS is the baseload from nuclear, Drax, distributed wind etc... but from time to time surge power is needed and for that we turn to more expensive under capacity gas peaker plants (the private healthcare sector).
Though almost certainly we do not have the base load capacity that we need:
Indeed. Which is where Robin's preventative medicine also comes in I guess... to stretch the analogy, better diets are the low energy light bulbs and double glazing.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Even two days before an election, political news is an iceberg whose surface visibility represents public awareness of a story. While we’re all chuntering about who tweeted X to Y, many people are still on “Corbyn wants to tax more” or “Boris wants Brexit”.
However, one story every two or three days, maybe even a week, rises above the surface with the potential for its headline essence to cut through. I suspect “Kid sleeping on hospital floor” has done so in the past 24 hours, having led the 10pm news last night and this morning’s papers. It’s a pic I’ve seen a lot in my reasonably balanced, relatively apolitical Facebook feed.
(Interestingly, I’m not sure the licence fee stuff has so much, despite the Mail’s best efforts).
How much effect it’ll have, I’m not sure. But if I was CCHQ I’d want those moments to happen to Corbyn rather than my fella.
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
All the big moments happened before the election was called.
I am starting to have a little wobble on the Tory majority.
Fact is, yesterday was not a great day for the Tory campaign. Do events like this matter? Well, it’s up for debate, but let’s say it shifts a small number of people into wavering or not voting (I think it’s probably unlikely to produce many direct switchers, but there might be a few).
That’s all fine if the lead is Opinium levels but it might make the difference if the lead is more like what ICM are reporting.
I could now see a result where the Tories just fall short. It might not matter with SF abstentions, but it means we’ll probably get another election soon.
The fake "my mum who's a nurse" Facebook post that the Tories spread everywhere AND the "I got punched! / I got better" story - both prove that somewhere in the Tory machine the landslide isn't there and they are worried about a majority.
The boy on the floor (I expect HYUFD to tell us he doesn't exist at all and was made up by Owen Jones or something) - once you get past the "this is awful" response the Tory machine could have pointed to all the new hospitals it plans to build staffed by new doctors and nurses. "We know there are problems - its been too successful, here is the vat of cash we're going to fix it with"
Instead we get the Dead Cat. There was no boy. Its staged. My friend says so. And the supposed lamping of Hancock. To me this isn't the sign of a campaign feeling confident. Its a campaign in a blind panic that the photo could resonate and bring back all those red wall Labour switchers.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Really? The volcano is not a big story? The NHS story is newspaper worthy of course but with so many people fed up with the election the volcano carries a much broader audience.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
It is tedious, but one must try one's best to ignore it and remember that they'll be gone in another couple of days.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
There are probably a good deal more of us around than that. Figures regarding the proportion of non-hetero persons in the population are always contentious, primarily because they're bound to be skewed by the relative willingness or reluctance of the respondents in surveys to come out in the first place.
Most obviously amongst the ONS figures, the percentage of people stating that they're LGB is about 4% amongst the under 25's. Does that mean that the British population is getting more gay over time, or simply that the overall 2% figure means that people are more likely still to be hiding in the back of the closet the older they are? I know what common sense tells me.
How ‘classic PB’ to spiral off into a discussion of demographic statistics, when the OP’s original statement was about “interest in gay sex”!
Maybe you’d do better looking to dig out some viewing statistics from popular porn sites?
Perhaps Liberal democratism is a lot like homosexuality. Many dabble with it in their youth and a smallish number become quite keen on it. For others it is just a part of a passing phase of youthful experimentation. However most of us have probably fantasised about it at one time or another!
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
All the big moments happened before the election was called.
Except the terror attack but yes I don’t think Andrew Neil, anti semitism or boy on floor are having much effect on the Brexit election. The battleground lines were drawn in October
Some of the money is certainly misallocated, but I have never argued that the problems of the NHS are purely, or even predominantly financial.
Thanks. I am v interested to hear your thoughts but perhaps another day not at midnight.
Long post, sorry.
I’m just about to enter my 25th year in the NHS (as a manager) - and I’ve worked in a range of settings in primary, acute and specialist care in Scotland, Wales and England.
I’ve worked in failing organisations and currently work for a Trust that just received its second CQC Outstanding rating and has been rated the best in the UK by patients and staff multiple times in the past decade. The difference between the two is primarily a question of leadership, not resource.
In those 25 years, every year I’ve been told the NHS is on its knees and morale has never been lower.
The problem is not one of money (although more is often helpful).
The problems are two-fold:
1. The service is still designed around a disease burden and epidemiology from 1948, with patients bouncing between different sectors. Boundaries and thresholds are introduced to manage flow and protect expensive resources - meaning diagnosis and treatment is fragmented and episodic. Modern medicine is a team game that requires integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time. The service simply isn’t designed in this way.
2. it is still like a supertanker in two important ways:
Firstly change takes an awful long time to introduce, with each local system wanting to test new ideas and develop their own evidence base. innovation should be a standard franchised approach and implemented universally.
Secondly, it is very difficult to turn on and off “surge” capacity when demand increases - winter, Mondays, 0800-1000 everyday, etc. It’s a bit like trying to run the national grid using only coal-fired power stations when everyone wants a cuppa during the ad break in X-Factor. The pressure relief in the system as @Foxy sadly knows too well is to delay entry to the system through A&E waits, ambulance waits and patients on trolleys; or to switch planned capacity off and convert to urgent capacity. Both are a raw deal for patients and staff.
The answer isn’t the difference between £30bn or £36bn; or more/less privatisation. It’s not 40 more hospitals - when out of hospital capacity is what’s often needed.
The answer is to resign the whole system - into an integrated health and social care system that focuses as much on prevention and prediction of ill health as it does on treatment and earlier intervention.
But those answers are difficult for vote-chasing politicians.
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
All the big moments happened before the election was called.
Except the terror attack but yes I don’t think Andrew Neil, anti semitism or boy on floor are having much effect on the Brexit election. The battleground lines were drawn in October
Keep telling yourself this if you like but I know no-one where I live who is talking about Brexit. Perhaps they are more in the Labour heartlands, but even there it's not the cut through you hoped.
As even Laura K mentioned yesterday, in Labour's red wall, two issues are making the cut through: Brexit AND the NHS.
The lack of perspective and balance amongst tories on here is truly frightening. It suggests to me they know they're not doing as well as they hoped.
The Tories on here won’t talk about the disinformation bots they’ve happily been using as evidence of the photo being faked, because then they’d have to admit to being hypocrites and they won’t do that!
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Really? The volcano is not a big story? The NHS story is newspaper worthy of course but with so many people fed up with the election the volcano carries a much broader audience.
Which part of my sentence 'the volcano is big news' did you not read?
I hope the truth will out so that arseholes on both sides can accept it. Won't happen.
Purdah rules presumably mean all the hospital can do is take it on face value and issue an apology. But after the election, once an investigation has been carried out, they'll be free to set the record straight one way or another.
Purdah rules don’t apply to hospitals . The hospital has confirmed the journalists report . I can’t believe purdah is now being brought into this !
Not quite
The apology I saw was that there was an apology there was no bed in the treatment room
AIUI (not a medical professional) pneumonia would largely be treated on an outpatient basis rather than requiring hospitalisation
So it’s a reasonable judgement by the hospital to say this patient doesn’t need to lie down they can use the room without a bed” - they are essentially figuring out how to optimise the use of limited capacity
Unfortunately the kid then got tired and wanted to rest and the rest is history
So: reasonable judgement leading to a sub optimal outcome. Image used to tell a political story which they don’t fully support.
I’m not a doctor either, but I was in A&E with pneumonia a few weeks ago. I was in hospital for a week. The treatment was antibiotics, but most homes aren’t really set up to administer them intravenously.
The fake "my mum who's a nurse" Facebook post that the Tories spread everywhere AND the "I got punched! / I got better" story - both prove that somewhere in the Tory machine the landslide isn't there and they are worried about a majority.
That's exactly it. What does it tell us? That they're worried. They know it's a real fight.
I still think when Dominic Cummings blogged that we're heading for a hung parliament it wasn't mind games. This is still on a knife-edge.
I do think the tories will just do it. But it's close. They know it.
I am starting to have a little wobble on the Tory majority.
Fact is, yesterday was not a great day for the Tory campaign. Do events like this matter? Well, it’s up for debate, but let’s say it shifts a small number of people into wavering or not voting (I think it’s probably unlikely to produce many direct switchers, but there might be a few).
That’s all fine if the lead is Opinium levels but it might make the difference if the lead is more like what ICM are reporting.
I could now see a result where the Tories just fall short. It might not matter with SF abstentions, but it means we’ll probably get another election soon.
I stand by my view from last week that we could have everything from a hung parliament to a Tory majority of 40, with a +20-25 feeling the most likely for most of the last week. Over the last day or so I think we might have moved from a Tory +20/25 to +10-20.
The fake "my mum who's a nurse" Facebook post that the Tories spread everywhere AND the "I got punched! / I got better" story - both prove that somewhere in the Tory machine the landslide isn't there and they are worried about a majority.
That's exactly it. What does it tell us? That they're worried. They know it's a real fight.
I still think when Dominic Cummings blogged that we're heading for a hung parliament it wasn't mind games. This is still on a knife-edge.
I do think the tories will just do it. But it's close. They know it.
Although I'm more a lurker than a poster, I'm quite bored of "contributors" such as the one below who seem to come onto this site just before elections, and do nothing but pump for/against a certain party twisting and distorting as much as they can to paint a certain narrative and then disappear the moment 10pm hits on election night. It seems to have led to a pretty severe downturn in the quality of discussion here.
It is tedious, but one must try one's best to ignore it and remember that they'll be gone in another couple of days.
From what I hear the LibDems are rather less confident of Hallam than they should be.
Jesus. Surely Labour can't hold Hallam after the fiasco of Jared O'Meara?
The result will speak volumes, whichever way it goes
Is Jo Swinson at risk of being less effective than Tim Farron? Perhaps his approach of spending the campaign talking about gay sex wasn't as bad as we thought.
With gay sex you can at least guarantee 1 in 10 of the population are interested in it!
There are probably a good deal more of us around than that. Figures regarding the proportion of non-hetero
How ‘classic PB’ to spiral off into a discussion of demographic statistics, when the OP’s original statement was about “interest in gay sex”!
Maybe you’d do better looking to dig out some viewing statistics from popular porn sites?
Perhaps Liberal democratism is a lot like homosexuality. Many dabble with it in their youth and a smallish number become quite keen on it. For others it is just a part of a passing phase of youthful experimentation. However most of us have probably fantasised about it at one time or another!
According to the YouGov MRP methodology, LD supporters are unusually evenly spread by age.
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
All the big moments happened before the election was called.
Except the terror attack but yes I don’t think Andrew Neil, anti semitism or boy on floor are having much effect on the Brexit election. The battleground lines were drawn in October
Keep telling yourself this if you like but I know no-one where I live who is talking about Brexit. Perhaps they are more in the Labour heartlands, but even there it's not the cut through you hoped.
As even Laura K mentioned yesterday, in Labour's red wall, two issues are making the cut through: Brexit AND the NHS.
The lack of perspective and balance amongst tories on here is truly frightening. It suggests to me they know they're not doing as well as they hoped.
Ah, a new peak in the lack-of-self-awareness stakes.
Meanwhile, where's my blizzard? You promised us a blizzard!
The fake "my mum who's a nurse" Facebook post that the Tories spread everywhere AND the "I got punched! / I got better" story - both prove that somewhere in the Tory machine the landslide isn't there and they are worried about a majority.
That's exactly it. What does it tell us? That they're worried. They know it's a real fight.
I still think when Dominic Cummings blogged that we're heading for a hung parliament it wasn't mind games. This is still on a knife-edge.
I do think the tories will just do it. But it's close. They know it.
It isn’t like. Adopt brace position.
Yes, it is like when Leicester were 5 nil up at half time, so banged in another 4 goals against Southampton for good measure.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Really? The volcano is not a big story? The NHS story is newspaper worthy of course but with so many people fed up with the election the volcano carries a much broader audience.
It isn’t an NHS story. It’s a story about the character and nature of our prospective PM.
There are an awful lot of posts from a few posters ramping that its a close run thing without much evidence of this. I suspect it is more a reasonable majority or an utter thrashing (Labour 180MPs ish) but I don't know either. That's why the desperate attempt via ramping on this site to get some Labour voters back to avoid a hiding. That seems the most likely scenario to me.
He ranted and raged at the Health Secretary for doing his job and visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm.
Disgraceful behaviour from the hard left
The guy shouted his disagreements. That's what demonstrators do. On all sides. You can criticise his words or tone, sure. I don't agree with his approach either.
But you @HYUFD watched that video and now you're wriggling to justify. (Just as Laura Kuennesberg for not checking properly before pouring out fakes to millions. I'm not suggesting you carry the same burden or expectation as them, but...)
... can you at least bring yourself to acknowledge that it was untrue that the guy punched or even assaulted or did anything physical to the Tory guy?
Rather than trying to compound your mistake by your devious words '...visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm."
That is vile disingenuity in the extreme. You've become part of the problem you complain of.
He is a real nasty piece of work, a sleazeball of the worst kind.
I can't believe the front page headline in the Times - Brits injured, and oh yes, by the way, some Jonny Foreigners have died.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
The volcano is a big story and is something people wish to read about for a number of reasons. My wife is politically engaged but has no idea what happened on the election trail yesterday and nor will the vast majority of voters. A volcano eruption with British lives at risk is a pretty unusual and front page worthy story any time of year.
That's just not true at all. The volcano is big news but so is the NHS story which is front page on lots of papers this morning, including Britain's most widely read one. Loads of people are talking about it on social media too.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Really? The volcano is not a big story? The NHS story is newspaper worthy of course but with so many people fed up with the election the volcano carries a much broader audience.
It isn’t an NHS story. It’s a story about the character and nature of our prospective PM.
The volcano could be a metaphor for Johnson. Unpredictable, unstable, looks good to those seeking to be impressed but liable to do appalling damage at any moment if it gets enough power.
All the big moments in this election so far have not changed the polling much. So either it has and the polling hasn't picked it up, or people are not getting involved in the day to day. In my experience its the latter.
All the big moments happened before the election was called.
Except the terror attack but yes I don’t think Andrew Neil, anti semitism or boy on floor are having much effect on the Brexit election. The battleground lines were drawn in October
Keep telling yourself this if you like but I know no-one where I live who is talking about Brexit. Perhaps they are more in the Labour heartlands, but even there it's not the cut through you hoped.
As even Laura K mentioned yesterday, in Labour's red wall, two issues are making the cut through: Brexit AND the NHS.
The lack of perspective and balance amongst tories on here is truly frightening. It suggests to me they know they're not doing as well as they hoped.
Ah, a new peak in the lack-of-self-awareness stakes.
Meanwhile, where's my blizzard? You promised us a blizzard!
we have it thanks, you can have it back any time you like
I am starting to have a little wobble on the Tory majority.
You should.
I 'think' they will win a narrow majority but I, too, am less-than-sure about this. My betting position is pretty neatly covered I think.
This is tight. Much much tighter than some on here are telling themselves.
After 2017 they are not taking anything for granted. I'm pretty happy it will be a decent (50+) majority.
Notwitstanding a child on a hospital floor, the final message of this campaign from the Tories will be the one that resonates - just make this shit-show of years of Westminster deadlock and game-playing end. Only anarchists want more of the same - and they don't vote. In the legions of undecided, it is what will deliver them at the ballot box.
To Boris.
And Boris's Love Actually bit of social media is perfect for the job. I suspect many of the final hold-outs of the Brexit Party will come round. The never-before-Tories of the Midlands and the North will go through with it (many not having admitted their intention to even their nearest and dearest, let alone a pollster). The "Corbyn is worse than Brexit" always-before-been-Tories will wobble from supporting Jo Swinson. Those seats it was unthinkable the Tories might lose will, come Friday, be just that again - unthinkable as Tory losses.
But many of those seats which Labour thought theirs for all time will either be gone or be turned into marginals.
How lies are spread. I am sure all sides do it. It is terrifying ...
It truly is terrifying. This country is screwed. We're in Trump-world now.
All sides do it. That is the most frightening part. It's hard to know how you combat it. Facebook is not something I am a part of so I don't see any of this. But it is clearly immmensely powerful. In the end, people will believe what they want to believe. I am as guilty of that as anyone. In the end, I suppose, the only defence to fake news is self awareness.
The Electoral Commission has been recommending legislation ahead of this election for the last couple of years - recently calling for it on an emergency basis.
Comments
Someone has faked the headline voter intention , the rest of the poll numbers as in demographics etc are exactly the same as the one released at the weekend.
Rob D got there first ! lol but these types of fake polls can cause currency fluctuations .
Hospital floors - when your man puts out fakenews tweets about having to sit on the floor of a train that was actually empty, I’m not sure you have much right to be morally outraged when people are sceptical of a similar photo coming out 3 days before an election.
Why is it by the way the hard left think they have a monopoly on morality? Do you genuinely think any PM goes into the job thinking, “you know what I wanna do? Force sick kids to sleep on the floor”? It’s such facile tribalism. Grow up.
On your point about "integration and co-ordination to manage multiple chronic diseases over long periods of time", do Children's Hospitals work any better given that they have a wide range of specialists within the one organisation?
But you @HYUFD watched that video and now you're wriggling to justify. (Just as Laura Kuennesberg for not checking properly before pouring out fakes to millions. I'm not suggesting you carry the same burden or expectation as them, but...)
... can you at least bring yourself to acknowledge that it was untrue that the guy punched or even assaulted or did anything physical to the Tory guy?
Rather than trying to compound your mistake by your devious words '...visiting a hospital then whacked his head with his arm."
That is vile disingenuity in the extreme. You've become part of the problem you complain of.
- Got 'senior party members' to lie to top journalists Kuenssberg and Peston, who then spread that lie around the world: that a Lab campaigner 'punched' a Tory ministers staff... (the video shows someone bumped lightly into an outstretched hand!)
- Continued with their numerous fake 'campaign group' Facebook sites to avoid advertising restrictions/scrutiny
- Purchased slots and designs to pretend to be the Labour manifesto website so as to lie and subvert the vote of those who didn't understand (and there are many, but everyone has a vote)
- Set bots to send identical messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of people pretending to be a friend of a staff member (at a mis-named) 'Leeds Hospital' to counter the story of Boris Johnson weirdly taking a journalist's phone and handling the questions badly when asked about a boy there who (the hospital admitted) had no bed (for which they apologised)?
Those supporting Johnson because they criticise Corbyn for AS, you have some nerve, or are utterly blinkered: how can you bring yourself to support Johnson who insisted on publishing his friends vile anti-semitic articles about the 'global Jewish conspiracy' in 2001 whilst he was editor at the Spectator, against protestations, and refused to apologise.
I'm not fan of LD Lab or Corbyn, but they pale into insignificance compared to Johnson and his current Tories. I'm voting Green in a safe Lab seat. I'd vote tactically at this election for protecting our climate and biosphere and against the insane and dangerous Tories. I prefer proportional representation - with single member seats combined. When an election is won on only a few thousand votes and in most seats the majority of voters votes are meaningless, the system is dead.
A hung parliament is the only way. But only Lab has even started to address the most significant currently-known threat to our species existence (since policy can only be made on the best evidence we have, and the best evidence we have is clear and demands instant urgent action), and that trumps everything (no pun intended
p.s. Regarding the hospital photo, the parent may not want to be in the public eye, or for their child, but that's a bit tough, inescapable, if you send photos to a newspaper.
There are stimuli from the external environment to which we attach meaning based on our world view and experience. These interpretations are only really elevated to the status of 'facts' if we all agree on their meaning - as for the most part we do in the hard sciences. But even what is 'fact' in physics has changed many times over the course of that science's development.
Maybe theoretical mathematics is the only place where there are immutable facts because they are provable from the chosen axioms. But even there, I would hazard that there was a time when it was a 'fact' that there is no such thing as the square root of -1.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/04/one-in-50-uk-lesbian-gay-bisexual
But in this particular case you have, on the one hand, a protester - and on the other, a party officially briefing journalists with what they know are lies. And their supporters here still trying to justify the lies after they have shown to be so.
Not quite accurate to say that the problem is not money, when social care - which you rightly say needs to be integrated with the health system - is so grossly underfunded.
The rationing of continuing health care for elderly patients on discharge from hospital into care homes, for example, makes the rationing your refer to above pale by comparison.
I agree about surge capacity, and its consequent impact on elective provision. Running at bed occupancy rates in the high nineties is far higher than comparable systems on the continent.
The source for me saying the high cost of care in the final year is a myth is this:
https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8737
https://twitter.com/marcowenjones/status/1204183081009262592
As the population ages, and has more chronic illness, those pressures will worsen.
As for health care itself, I'm no doctor but it seems to me that the "prevention" model of healthcare is very difficult in the British system because there is an inbuilt moral hazard. There's no reward / incentive for living healthily and scant punishment for living badly - some moderate sin taxes on booze and fags (which suffer widescale smuggling) and a few pennies on sugar. The polluter also barely pays (some scant petrol taxes).
The £9 per item subscription charge is also a clumsy and regressive way of making primary healthcare more economically efficient. Far better to charge per GP appointment.
But it's hard for British politicians to go anywhere near this stuff because you get people losing their mind at you.
Illumina are still promising a DNA decoder on every GPs desk to sequence genomes at US$100 per go. Perhaps this is when things will really change. Hopefully it will trigger a shift in cultural mindset so that people choose to take charge of their own wellbeing rather than expecting Nanny do everything for them. I'm not holding my breath though.
I note that some of the accounts are claiming that he is next to a bed. The item on his right side with castors is an equipment trolley, not a bed.
My take? None of their party switchers will get re-elected. Come Friday, they may be looking for a new leader from a very limited talent pool.
Scotland - looking very troubling for them.
SW - maybe they will take St. Ives - because it's far-flung Cornwall and they are contrarians. But Revoke and Swinson play badly there, as anywhere. I think the Cons will now hold N. Cornwall and N. Devon.
Cheltenham - no longer a given for them. But Bath looks safe.
Midlands - where the squeeze between the big two leaves them most irrelevent
Wales - can't see them having more than one seat on Friday
East - North Norfolk is a Con Gain. Cambridge stays Labour
NW - Southport in the Cons column
SE - Eastbourne a sneaked Con win
London Remainia - Zac will lose - but he's coming back fast, so by nowhere near as much as looked the case a few weeks ago.
Everywhere else, the LibDems will flatter to deceive.
Boris made a small error in the live interview with the phone. But overall, its clearly a set up job involving the parents and Mirror to weaponise the NHS, just as the left try every election.
Where are we now, 48 hours or so to save the NHS?
They along with the Welsh poll seem to back Survation report, ICM looks very out of kilter.
So I'm struggling to understand the movement of a Tory majority on betfair from 1.24 to 1.34 over the last twenty four hours?
The apology I saw was that there was an apology there was no bed in the treatment room
AIUI (not a medical professional) pneumonia would largely be treated on an outpatient basis rather than requiring hospitalisation
So it’s a reasonable judgement by the hospital to say this patient doesn’t need to lie down they can use the room without a bed” - they are essentially figuring out how to optimise the use of limited capacity
Unfortunately the kid then got tired and wanted to rest and the rest is history
So: reasonable judgement leading to a sub optimal outcome. Image used to tell a political story which they don’t fully support.
Meanwhile the Mail and Express go with Bozo's dead cat. Pathetic.
In our local system, winter pressures (ha, misnomer as it’s all year round now) focus is on two things - getting senior clinical decision makers to the front door to ensure speedy diagnosis and divert patients who don’t need/shouldn’t be in hospital; and ensuring smooth flow out of hospital into home/social care. This requires real partnership working - which the organisational barriers don’t;t always
By and large the flow works ok and can cope with statistically normal variation in demand. But the slightest hiccough (an outbreak of of a vomiting bug on a community hospital ward for example) and the whole system clogs up and can take days to recover.
Use of the private sector is fundamental - it already provides much of our social care capacity, and is capable of vital surge capacity or ring-fences planned capacity that helps to ensure routine operations can continue.
Those who would deny all private sector involvement in care simply don’t understand the cost-effective role it can play in keeping the whole system running.
In my experience its the latter.
Most obviously amongst the ONS figures, the percentage of people stating that they're LGB is about 4% amongst the under 25's. Does that mean that the British population is getting more gay over time, or simply that the overall 2% figure means that people are more likely still to be hiding in the back of the closet the older they are? I know what common sense tells me.
Relatedly, I'm not entirely sure why, if the tories are really doing so well, there's a weird disinformation bubble among them on here.
Maybe you’d do better looking to dig out some viewing statistics from popular porn sites?
It's a grim dystopian reality.
https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news-and-events/media-centre/press-releases/nhs-bed-occupancy-rates/
And trolley waits do matter:
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/10/thousands-of-patients-die-waiting-for-beds-in-hospitals-study?__twitter_impression=true
Our media and Government are running scared from being held to account.
But baffled why you think sequencing genomes would improve anything.
The biggest killer in the UK, and virtually everywhere else, is cardiovascular disease. How much time do we spend talking about that particular killer, rather than say cancer?
We don't need to sequence a genome to know that cutting out the fags, booze and losing weight would dramatically improve the nation's health. But moral hazard.
However, one story every two or three days, maybe even a week, rises above the surface with the potential for its headline essence to cut through. I suspect “Kid sleeping on hospital floor” has done so in the past 24 hours, having led the 10pm news last night and this morning’s papers. It’s a pic I’ve seen a lot in my reasonably balanced, relatively apolitical Facebook feed.
(Interestingly, I’m not sure the licence fee stuff has so much, despite the Mail’s best efforts).
How much effect it’ll have, I’m not sure. But if I was CCHQ I’d want those moments to happen to Corbyn rather than my fella.
Fact is, yesterday was not a great day for the Tory campaign. Do events like this matter? Well, it’s up for debate, but let’s say it shifts a small number of people into wavering or not voting (I think it’s probably unlikely to produce many direct switchers, but there might be a few).
That’s all fine if the lead is Opinium levels but it might make the difference if the lead is more like what ICM are reporting.
I could now see a result where the Tories just fall short. It might not matter with SF abstentions, but it means we’ll probably get another election soon.
The boy on the floor (I expect HYUFD to tell us he doesn't exist at all and was made up by Owen Jones or something) - once you get past the "this is awful" response the Tory machine could have pointed to all the new hospitals it plans to build staffed by new doctors and nurses. "We know there are problems - its been too successful, here is the vat of cash we're going to fix it with"
Instead we get the Dead Cat. There was no boy. Its staged. My friend says so. And the supposed lamping of Hancock. To me this isn't the sign of a campaign feeling confident. Its a campaign in a blind panic that the photo could resonate and bring back all those red wall Labour switchers.
Perhaps the result will be close after all...?
As even Laura K mentioned yesterday, in Labour's red wall, two issues are making the cut through: Brexit AND the NHS.
The lack of perspective and balance amongst tories on here is truly frightening. It suggests to me they know they're not doing as well as they hoped.
I 'think' they will win a narrow majority but I, too, am less-than-sure about this. My betting position is pretty neatly covered I think.
This is tight. Much much tighter than some on here are telling themselves.
I still think when Dominic Cummings blogged that we're heading for a hung parliament it wasn't mind games. This is still on a knife-edge.
I do think the tories will just do it. But it's close. They know it.
Meanwhile, where's my blizzard? You promised us a blizzard!
Con on 360+ seats IMO.
To Boris.
And Boris's Love Actually bit of social media is perfect for the job. I suspect many of the final hold-outs of the Brexit Party will come round. The never-before-Tories of the Midlands and the North will go through with it (many not having admitted their intention to even their nearest and dearest, let alone a pollster). The "Corbyn is worse than Brexit" always-before-been-Tories will wobble from supporting Jo Swinson. Those seats it was unthinkable the Tories might lose will, come Friday, be just that again - unthinkable as Tory losses.
But many of those seats which Labour thought theirs for all time will either be gone or be turned into marginals.
Maybe. Maybe not. 62 hours to the exit poll......
Clearly not a government priority.