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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Saving lives and protecting the NHS
In Lord Denning’s 1980 judgement preventing the Birmingham Six from suing the police for injuries while in custody, he stated:
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Good piece as ever from Ms Cyclefree. Treating a healthcare system as if it were a religion inevitably leads to them thinking they are invincible - as we've seen with many religions in recent times. No institution should ever be beyond criticism.
Brief the spin to the papers
https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1259941601838800899
Then spend the next day winding it back and cleaning it up
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1260109715322871813
Same sh!t, diff'rent day.
V
Take the risk
V
Go back to work
You know it
But BoZo wants to be loved. He wanted to be the guy that saved the summer hollibobs. So he spaffed it.
And now they have to clean up his shit, again.
We need you to self isolate after flying home. Upon arrival please collect your bags. Get some snacks from the shop. Get on the train. Go to the loo. Get in the taxi. Then upon arrival at home stay there for 2 weeks. Its very important that all arrivals from abroad* do not interact with anyone for two weeks
*OK when we say abroad we don't mean Ireland. No virus there. Or France. No virus there either. Or Belgium or the Netherlands by boat. No virus there. The countries you can travel into before getting to France Belgium the Netherlands? They're fine too.
Fun fact: Martinique is part of metropolitan France. It's not great but it is Caribbean...
Oh shit.
My researches the other day indicated that in normal times 50% of those who go to a care home die within 482 days. Some, of course, live for years, probably those who go into the home in better health in the first place. For many it is a sad and somewhat bewildering end of life when their family is no longer able to cope with dementia or illness.
We need to do better than this but it is absurd to think that can be done without significant new money at a time when the public finances are going to be in a near catastrophic state. We need to go back to May's plans at the 2017 election. The priority is not the inheritance or keeping the family home. The priority is ensuring that those who need care get what they deserve. The State cannot provide this unaided. It needs to come from the estate of those receiving it whether before or after death.
I was contemplating writing something along the same lines myself, but my head has not been in the right place for setting out anything coherent enough to form a header.
Why are social care and NHS not integrated?
This is a question that cries out for an answer, but I'd go further. Under the existing system, it's not just a lack of integration, it's also that over the last few years increasing hurdles have been erected for individuals seeking to navigate between the two systems.
When someone goes into care, the responsibility of the NHS for their healthcare does not end. Under the rather misleadingly named "Continuing Healthcare Framework", the NHS is still responsible for funding the healthcare of those who have been assessed and found to have a "primary health need" as set out in the National Framework.
As the language suggests, this process is bureaucratic, difficult to navigate for individuals (some might say deliberately so), time consuming, and increasingly likely over the last few years to end in disappointment, unless the healthcare needs are absolutely undeniable.
One might argue that Covid patients discharged into care homes fall into the category of those who should be assessed as having a "primary health need", and should remain the responsibility of the NHS. Quite how this system has operated on the last couple of months, I do not know, but I'd be interested to find out - and it ought to be asked in any enquiry.
https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1259884144940720128
https://twitter.com/Jgs_x/status/1260118272726482944
The whole purpose of lockdown was to protect the vulnerable. If we can’t even do that, really what is the point of it all?
Both solutions have been proposed and both attacked because No one was brave enough to say the options are X or Y take your pick.
It's actually one of the few things I would use a referendum on the options - this problem isn't nice, none of the options are liked so take your pick.
What's the story of France getting Martinique back - I thought we took it from Napoleon. What did we trade it for?
Mine has been great - she organised getting every vulnerable person on the books onto the government list, redeployed staff to deliver medicine to elderly/shielding. She even arranged a system for calling people who were due for (vital) hospital appointments to encourage them to go.
Next one over (as it were) shut up shop and barely answers the phone.
There seem to be a high enough proportion of asymptomatic carriers that it can survive in a chain of asymptomic cases until it re-emerges.
It should have been blatantly obvious that discharging Covid patients into care homes would present them with the same challenge as the Covid wards in hospitals, but without the trained staff, equipment, or dedicates premises to deal with the challenge.
I think that something in the order of fifteen thousand patients were discharged either into care or back into the community without any real consideration of the consequences.
I would say, just as exposing police corruption is a pro-police activity, exposing problems in the NHS is a pro-NHS activity.
It might be kept sufficiently under control for track and trace to keep it that way until a vaccine can eliminate it.
The monomania of protecting the NHS at all costs has undoubtedly cost many thousand lives.
https://twitter.com/politicshome/status/1260122367436763136
It is a difficult bureaucratic system because as a society we don’t really value old people enough as a group, whatever we may think of our own individual elders.
I really hope there is a proper inquiry into this and real effective changes made for the sake of all those like you who have lost a loved parent or grand-parent or friend.
At which point they will be the envy of the world.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1260043770223083521?s=20
He needs to “stay alert”
Call them NHS Care Homes and any proposal to change them for the better will be derided and castigated as blasphemy. Only more money will be accepted.
"Eliminate X!" is a tempting move in that position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4a7BrhlMTg
This is actually a position where Unions work, as if the union is a reasonable one, they can collectively make sure, in partnership with employers than sensible rules are in place to make the workplace reasonable.
I have criticised the Govt. for this in the past.
A limited number of primary school children may go back but they will not be fully functioning primary schools
Furthermore, secondary schools look as if they are off until September term
It looks to me like Trump may be re-elected.
I guess a few us can offer thinking Clinton was going to win last time. Although not my worst prediction.
Not quite a prediction, but I did once (back in 1983) turn down a ticket to see U2 at a small venue saying I'd never heard of them and so wasn't interested.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/884-new-covid-19-cases-in-singapore-bringing-total-in-singapore-past-24000
The big question is how could you use empty hotels for looking after people who are ill but not ill enough to need hospital care. And we need to answer that question before wave 2 arrives.
This election is going to be utterly brutal and bat shit crazy.
Just hope Biden is listening to Bill Clinton and not his wife when it comes to reaching out to the rural whites he needs to turn around.
It's also a bureaucratic system which has deliberately been rendered steadily more difficult to navigate over the couple of decades since the Coghlan case -
https://caretobedifferent.co.uk/the-coughlan-case/
- in order to limit as much as possible the numbers of those assessed to have a "primary health need".
In the UK if you say the Tories are 10 points ahead then there have been times when it wouldn't have been obvious whether Labour were second, or another party was.
By the way, analysis of the US trade talks by Ed Malls and others here:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/publications/awp/awp136
He's got a webinar with George Osborne at lunchtime:
https://twitter.com/edballs/status/1260098881599258624
- whatever you think of them, they're likely to have thoughts worth hearing on this.
For the record, folks, Mr Meeks thinks that because I agree with Boris and many scientists that we now have to incorporate 'some' risk when we get back into the world, that as a result it's inevitable some people will die, that this is somehow 'casual.' It isn't. I have buried many people close to me so I know death viscerally in a way that Mr Meeks did before he became an extinct and now fossilised ostrich with a head rammed an awful long way down in the sand.
This virus is pernicious. But I'm afraid it's here. We cannot remain in lockdown in perpetuity. The nation's mental, emotional, physical, domestic and economic wellbeing requires that lockdown now eases. We have to take some of that risk and be as sensible - 'alert' - as we can be whilst getting out. Back on the horse, as it were. Nanny State cannot forever shield us from this. This is the reality.
But I'm afraid reality is a detached and distant concept to a hardened old socialist like Meeks. He lived and died in a world which no longer exists.