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The 2015 Popularity Contest (aka UK General Election )

Who will you be voting for?

  • Tory

    Votes: 38 9.9%
  • Diet Tory (Labour)

    Votes: 132 34.3%
  • Tory Zero (Greens)

    Votes: 44 11.4%
  • Extra Tory with lemon (UKIP)

    Votes: 40 10.4%
  • Lib Dems

    Votes: 9 2.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 31 8.1%
  • Cheese on toast

    Votes: 91 23.6%

  • Total voters
    385
  • Poll closed .
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The problem is much more than simply target times. It is all the drunks on a saturday night, the alcoholics and smackheads first thing in the morning, the people who have nothing wrong with them other than the slightest thing. Take all them out of the equation and you will find waiting times would indeed drop.

Spot on. A & E should be for just that. And not for some of the reasons people go there.
 
Again, is that an official explanation from the people at those hospitals or your own spin on the story? Why were these measures only present in 5 (or ~3%) of the 160 NHS Trusts?
It's not rocket science - listen to radio LBC - A staff nurse came on today our trained qualified doctors Nurses etc train up and go to Austrailia, USA etc for better money.
we end up with European non speaking English staff in the NHS - Tories cannot pay NHS staff a 1 percent recommended pay rise yet give all parliament 11 percent rise!
 
The NHS is a train wreck waiting to happen and has been for some time, eventually what is happening now was always going to happen, the cash that has been papering over the cracks has finally become unsustainable and dried up.

The ridiculous re-organisation by the Tories has done nothing to help and Labour are going to keep throwing the word privatisation around in order to try and win the next election despite the fact they will be giving out as many contracts to private companies as the Tories are now. All of this creates an atmosphere where the NHS will suffer a slow and painful death as it becomes too big for the government to fund and we will end up with a private health system (which both the Tories and Labour would both really be happy with)...

GOD BLESS POLITICS
 

We have more access to knowledge and information now than ever before, but I wonder if we do enough to provide youngsters with the belief that this knowledge can change their lives, and the skills to find and digest the knowledge. I wonder if schools should be less about teaching kids what to learn but more about teaching them how to learn.

You really think teachers doen't teach children how to learn? You really think we don't try to inspire them; fire their imagination; nurture their ambition? You have such a misguided and oversimplistic view of education.

I appreciate it's inevitably bias, but you read lots of stories in the press about teaching to the test and so on and it doesn't suggest a great deal of independence is allowed for in the curriculum.

Teaching to the tests is a political side-effect of government policy which insists on testing 11 year olds in English and Maths. The results, as we know, are compiled into "league tables" by the media (as opposed to the government) which in turn creates skewed impressions of schools (in that often the schools are perceived as "good" because they are in wealthy areas where children tend to do better since, as I keep saying, poverty is a barrier to achievement, whilst lower-achieving schools, which may well have brillant, committed workforces, are perceived to be substandard) thus leading to all sorts of other repercussions.

But, do you want the tests to be abandoned?
 
It's not rocket science - listen to radio LBC - A staff nurse came on today our trained qualified doctors Nurses etc train up and go to Austrailia, USA etc for better money.
we end up with European non speaking English staff in the NHS - Tories cannot pay NHS staff a 1 percent recommended pay rise yet give all parliament 11 percent rise!

Why would it be just 3% of trusts entering this phase? What is special about those (or the 97% that didn't)?
 
That's one hell of a claim.

Yes, I appreciate it's a generalisation. I can't think of many that have really achieved any sort of egalitarianism though. The Scandinavians have probably come closest, and they're not fully blown socialist states at all.

You really think teachers doen't teach children how to learn? You really think we don't try to inspire them; fire their imagination; nurture their ambition? You have such a misguided and oversimplistic view of education.

I'm sure many do, and suspect that's why most teachers get into the profession in the first place. I'm going off some studies on any skills gaps that exist between what pupils have and what employers need.


Teaching to the tests is a political side-effect of government policy which insists on testing 11 year olds in English and Maths. The results, as we know, are compiled into "league tables" by the media (as opposed to the government) which in turn creates skewed impressions of schools (in that often the schools are perceived as "good" because they are in wealthy areas where children tend to do better since, as I keep saying, poverty is a barrier to achievement, whilst lower-achieving schools, which may well have brillant, committed workforces, are perceived to be substandard) thus leading to all sorts of other repercussions.

But, do you want the tests to be abandoned?

I suppose it depends how they're used. I suspect tests are very useful if they're used to remind us of what we know or don't know (and thus need to work on). If they're used in order to rank (whether pupils or schools) then I think they have less value.

You undoubtedly know more about it than me however, what do you think?
 
A good piece on the pitiful state of debate around this issue

"
The political debate about the extreme pressure the NHS is currently under is barely serious. In reality, there is little real difference between the parties on NHS funding and some marginal differences on structure and regulation. Don’t get me wrong, the Conservatives have made mistakes not least in an ill-advised top-down reorganisation through legislation – one which they had counselled themselves against. But rather than seeking an honest debate about a service under extreme pressure, Labour chooses to play politics in the main. This election has already assumed a depressing pattern.

Something more fundamental is at the root of the current situation. We are witnessing a systemic failure to cope with rising demand. This means there are two parts to the equation – the system and demand. Spraying more cash at the problem, in the face of extreme capacity constraints, will do little at this stage. There is very little spare capacity- ie people and facilities – in reality. Instead, there is simply a system with so many perversities, skewed incentives, inefficiencies that it may seem difficult to know where to begin.

Wherever one would start, it would not be with a politicised debate. There is broad consensus about NHS funding between all the parties but some marginal differences in analysis of reform. This would appear to be an issue where there is scope for broad cross-party consensus on finding solutions to long-term problems. Don’t hold your breath.


If you want to see under the bonnet view of the NHS, I can recommend that you read a superb eye-witness analysis by Robert Colvile of the Telegraph. The basic message that comes through his piece, based on some time spent in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, is that there is heroic efficiency in some parts of the system but the system as whole is perverse. The target culture, tariff methodology, the divisions between different parts of the system in control, finance and governance, new regulatory requirements, bureaucratic complexity, and reaction to previous care crises such as Mid Staffs have meant a series of blockages in the system.

It’s easy to point the finger at politicians and administrators. But they work in the context we establish for them. They get the message that we don’t want to pay any more taxes but we want superb public services- which isn’t possible so they duck and dive. We use the services as if they were free to provide rather than simply free at the point of use. Colvile sees cases in A&E such as “palpitations”, “painful shoulder”, “headache”, retention (of urine)”, “deliberate self harm”, “cellulitis, toe, left” and “generally unwell”. Some of these cases may well require A&E, many don’t. On the Today programme yesterady, one patient complained that a child had vomited was not being seen. It may be unpleasant watching a child vomit but is that necessarily the priority? We put our own judgement ahead of professionals.

If we are going to resolve this fundamental stress then a fundamentally different approach is needed. More cash may be part of this but it is just one element. The chief executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, has shown every sign of knowing what needs to be done as evidenced by the (reassuringly short) Forward View that was published last year. Last year, we published an essay by Alex Fox of Sharing Lives, People-powered NHS, which identified how to ensure that patients’ needs are met both by giving them greater control over how the healthcare resources they require are spent and ensuring that the system becomes more responsive to their needs.

So the strategic change and coordination that Simons seeks is a critical component of change. However, more transparency and responsibility for patients is necessary too. The NHS, social care, and emergency services have to work as a system. That means that resource and capacity has to appear in the right places, in the right way, at the right time. Equally, patients, through the vehicle of personal budgets so common in social care, need to understand the choices that are made are their behalf and the consequences of those choices. The days of NHS as if it were free to provide have to end. No politician is saying that today.

None of this will happen in the short-term. Instead we will get a largely simulated national debate about the future of the NHS. The parties will probably get into a bidding war on financing the NHS: who will be first out of the blocks? I might run a book. The NHS will somehow struggle through the next few weeks as it always does at enormous cost to the well-being of its staff. And we will defer an honest national discussion about the future of the NHS we need to have.

Its basic institutional ethos as a service funded out of general taxation, free at the point of use, responding to needs is not going to change and nor should it. That gives us a chance to innovate but instead we use it as an opportunity for bureaucratic overload and a non-transparent market. In the words of Dame Julie Moore, chief executive of QEH, “We’ve neither got a market, nor a managed system – it’s neither fish nor fowl. We say patients can choose, but the money doesn’t follow the patient.” I would add that the patient has no idea how their treatment is resourced and the consequences of their choices as well as the choices made on their behalf and this is very damaging.

Instead, we should be debating how to change the system so it operates as a proper system and how we can radically change the relationship between the patient and the NHS. Later this year, Adam lent and I will be publishing a Power to Create paper on how to change the relationship between the citizen and the state. It will advocate greater transparency with more control over resources for public service users mixed with real system change aimed at securing a greater range of services, more innovation, and a greater focus on outcomes.

This will all require imaginative leadership. It is clear that there are imaginative leaders throughout the system: in hospitals (even the dreaded hospital managers that are constantly attacked), staff and professionals throughout the service, in professional bodies, and in the strategic roles in the NHS. What is lacking is real political leadership which honestly seeks to put the NHS on a sustainable footing. Unfortunately, that is needed if we are to see real change. But we as citizens have to accept our own responsibility too. Our demands and behaviours drive much of this. We need to be honest with ourselves too"

http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2015/enterprise/blame-nhs-overload/
 

I have a question. What are the views' of the mainstream parties on TTIP? This "free trade deal" is what worries the most...

Tories and by extension, UKIP, love it. Labour generally dislikes it, LD's view will be what Labour tell them when they're in Government together.
 

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