The NHS again

I wrote last week about how the Tories have worked out the way to destroy the NHS. This picture has just been passed on to me:

I usually thank the people I get - steal - pictures from but on this occasion I can't remember how it found its way to me. But thanks anyway.

So let's look at this a bit more closely:

1 Who is this private doctor? Has anyone checked out his or her qualifications? Do they speak enough English to be able to communicate with patients? Have they been police-checked? If you go to the NHS, you can be sure who is treating you. In my time, over the years, I've been treated by many overseas doctors in my local practice and in hospitals. I've only ever had to complain about one, and that's because he had the bedside manner of Jack the Ripper.

2 Walk-in GP clinic. Hmm. I know what I mean by that title, but it may not mean the same as the people running this walk-in clinic. My GP clinic - we call it the health centre - houses a group of GPs but it also has nurses, nurse practitioners and medical assistants who offer a whole range of services like blood and urine tests on-site and sends our samples out to NHS labs for processing. By the way, the labs are very efficient. I wish we could praise the backroom boys and girls of the NHS more). My health centre also has access to the whole of the NHS for x-rays.CAT scans/PET scans, physio (actually in the same building), specialist treatment by consultants and so on. We don't pay for those up-front.
3 Notice the price. Not enough to frighten the horses. A lot of people could probably afford £19 but that's not the price, which is 'from £19.' This is a wild guess but could it be that the services I referred to in 2 above are not included and if you need any specialist treatment you - or your health insurance company - will have to come up with the money? This is the US system, where you have to find 'co-funding' for tests: so if you need a test that costs $200, the insurance company only pays half and you have to pay $100 up front before the test is done. The system that operates in France is much the same: you pay for doctor's appointments up front and get some of the money back (depending on your status as a member of the national sécurité sociale scheme. Same with prescriptions: you pay up front and claim back. What this means in reality is what I've seen happening at the pharmacies in France: elderly people discussing with the staff which one of the three items the doctor has prescribed is the most important because they can't afford all three.
4 Where this private 'service' wins hands down is in what the poster doesn't say: you don't have to wait a couple of weeks to see a doctor; you can book online; and you get 15 minutes with the doctor when you get in there. There will be parts of England where I imagine this reads like heaven. But I keep on saying this: never under-estimate the greed of capitalism - and US-style medical services are an arm of capitalism. They exist to take our money off us and give it to their executives and shareholders.

And a final comment, to the mothers whose children were playing with the fruit and veg in my local posh supermarket: we're in the middle of an epidemic of the norovirus in Scotland. (I know of people who went on holiday to a few Scottish islands at New Year and came straight back because the sickness/diarrhea bug was rampant). The supermarket has installed hand sanitisers at the entrance to the supermarket. For the love of gawd, get your children to use them before and after. And if you're buying loose fruit and veg - in fact, even pre-packed fruit and veg - wash your hands!

Police Scotland

I alerted my faithful readers to the Scottish Tories' use of Freedom of Information requests only yesterday when they were doing a bit of NHS-bashing that didn't stand up to serious scrutiny. Today it's the turn of Police Scotland to get the Tory treatment, as reported here on the BBC Scotland website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38491433

The big headline is: Compensation paid out by Police Scotland has hit record levels, according to new figures. No figures are given, of course, to show how the figures have increased on last year or previous years.

Now you must know from press and TV comments in the past couple of weeks that Police Scotland is in trouble financially - it is £17.5 million overspent this year. Police Scotland is a massive organisation with 23,000 staff. It is still 'rationalising' its staff and its spending after putting all of Scotland's police forces under one banner. Savings were bound to take a while to kick in. For example, you can't decide on Monday that you're going to cut the number of police call centres and have the cuts and the staff savings in place by Friday. When there are to be cuts, there are workplace consultations to go through. The Police Federation has to be consulted so that police officers are sure their interests are safeguarded. Officers have to be given the chance to move to other posts if their current post is abolished. Funding has to be found if they are to be allowed to retire. All this is perfectly normal in any industry.

Yesterday, Police Scotland was getting a bashing for wasting money on Gaelic. The Gaelic Act was introduced in 2005 (I'm sure you'll remember Labour were in charge at Holyrood then). The aim of the Act - an aim I totally agree with - is to 'normalise' Gaelic as part of life in Scotland. One aim of the Act is for all public authorities to have a Gaelic Plan. Eleven years - that's eleven years - after the Act became law, the police are doing their plan. (I'm not being nasty here: the Gaelic Act was intended to be phased in and it just happens to be Police Scotland's turn now). Here are their aims: Police Scotland want police officers in areas where Gaelic is spoken to learn the language and will help them with that. No one will be forced to learn the language. Police Scotland will have dual-language signage on notepaper and forms and on police cars and other vehicles. End of. To listen to the press, every officer in Police Scotland is to be bilingual within five years (if they manage to do that, as a one-time language teacher I'd like to know how) and dual-language signs are going to be everywhere - and expensive. Newspaper reporters and people who write furious letters to newspapers have failed to notice that costs have already been assessed and changes are designed to be 'cost neutral.'

So what is today's headline telling us? In 2015/6, 'the force paid out £1.27million in damages as a result of 516 claims.' That's £1.27m out of a budget of £1.1billion.  I did it for the NHS allegations yesterday but I can't even be bothered to get the calculator out to work out what that comes to as a percentage. Not very much. Even the Tory spokesperson admitted the amount of money and the numbers of claims involved are very low but:

" (Police Scotland pay out) compensation payments on hundreds of occasions each year." And that means: "every day there is at least one incident which results in taxpayers' money being used to compensate for an error or incident." As we saw yesterday, big numbers are used to give us a shock but it all boils down to very little on analysis.

So the Tories' assertions are not true and Police Scotland is not as spineless as the NHS when it comes to standing up for itself - see the article on the BBC news website - even pointing how much money it claims back from car insurance companies whose insured drivers hit police vehicles.

But I would like a couple of minutes to consider these Freedom of Information requests. The Tories (and the LibDems) have become quite adept at making these requests and then using them to try to fool the public into thinking Scotland's public services are going to hell in a handcart. Who pays for these FOI requests? The Tories are great at telling us it's all about safeguarding the taxpayers's money. Are they doing that? Every FOI request has to be written by a member of an MSP's office staff (paid for by the taxpayer), filed with the public body it's aimed at and dealt with by a member of staff (paid for by the taxpayer). If all the Tories can come up with is the stuff here and in my previous post, I'm not sure we're getting value for money.

Not from the public bodies. From the Tories.

NHS24

Today's Sunday Herald (and no one was more surprised than me to find a Scottish Sunday paper in my letterbox on 1 January) has a brief article entitled: 2016 predicted to be record year for abandoned calls to NHS24.

So let's set the scene: NHS24 receives 1.5 million phone calls every year. In one 6 month period period (April to October), 32,881 calls were abandoned. A quick bit of mental arithmetic would make that roughly 66,000 in the whole year. My trusty calculator tells me that's .04% of the total calls received. Not an overwhelming number. Certainly within acceptable limits, I would think.

That's not how it's presented by the Tory MSP who writes about it: she makes it 150 calls a day abandoned. Well, that sounds a lot worse, doesn't it? She also says 2016 will be a 'record year' for abandoned calls but doesn't give any figures to back that up - like maybe figures for previous years.

She goes on to give reasons for people abandoning calls: 'because it's taking too long or being cut off through no fault of their own.' Both causes are possible but there's no suggestion that NHS24 has given her that information so she's frankly making it up. I could suggest a few more reasons people abandon calls:
- people phone up and then they or a relative decide they really need to go to A&E.
- people phone up, are put on hold because the staff are busy and hang up because, believe it on not, there are people in this world whose patience runs out after 30 seconds - sometimes sooner.
- people phone up and curse at the operator who then hangs up. That's official policy endorsed by employers. I did it a few times myself. Nobody goes to work to be abused.
- in odd cases, people phone up when they're drunk or on drugs, make no sense to the call handler who refers it to a supervisor and, after investigation, they hang up.

NHS24 says there's no evidence of staff ending calls 'inappropriately.' All calls are recorded so I'm guessing NHS24's IT staff and online supervisors can and do sample calls to check that.

So is there anything to worry about here?

In the case of NHS24 I worry about the stress call handlers are under, not to mention their supervisors and medical staff. Everyone can see onscreen while they are dealing with one sick person how many other people are waiting in the queue. They are trained medical people though, and deal with calls the way the rest of us wouldn't be able to: they are calm, they follow the protocols (is this a child we're dealing with or an elderly person or someone with a pre-existing condition?) and they are unfailingly polite and helpful.

I've only ever had to call them twice. The first time, I was able to go to an all-night chemist and pick up an inhaler; the second time, I was referred to the GP out-of-hours department at the Victoria Infirmary. In both cases, I was expected, didn't have to hang about and emerged reassured. I was also reassured when my GP practice phoned me next day to check how I was. Evidence to me of good communication and record-keeping.

If there's anything to worry about, it's the attitude of certain politicians and the media who seem to make endless Freedom of Information requests which they then try to stitch into an anti-NHS story. It doesn't surprise me at all that this story was put together by a Tory MSP. She is clearly following the agenda set down by the party in Westminster. The agenda looks like this:

1 Starve the NHS of money so that there aren't enough hospital doctors or nurses or beds, and waiting times go through the roof.
2 Starve the local authorities of money and blame them for not putting adequate care budgets in place. Then old people stuck in hospital because they can't get a care package in place to go home can be blamed for clogging up the NHS.
3 Blame the employees of the NHS, doctors, nurses and ancillary services like ambulance drivers and paramedics for refusing to swallow the idiotic idea that you can get 7-day services for a budget that barely covers 5.
4 Ignore the fact that the population has more and more older people needing medical attention. Ignore the fact that the population is growing anyway so we really need more GPs and more surgeries. Blame migrants for clogging up surgeries, despite the fact that we know - we know - that migrant workers do not over-use health facilities because they come here to work - and they work damned hard.
5 Get the right wing press to claim the NHS is failing. We're all each other's enemies now, fighting over a smaller and smaller pie, so we won't disagree when someone like Jeremy Hunt starts to privatise the NHS and other members of his party start to tell us that insurance (as in the US health system that is currently failing 27.5million people and which charges twice as much as the NHS) is the only way forward. Don't let anyone tell you the NHS is free. We pay for our NHS. Even I, retired nearly 9 years now, am still paying my share and happy to do so.

Above all, never forget: Nye Bevan, who fought hard to get his plan through Attlee’s postwar Labour cabinet, was determined the NHS should “universalise the best” care and not simply act as a safety net for the poor, and should be based on need, rather than ability to pay.

Happy New Year

And if you can have a happy New Year's Day, you're a better man than I am.

I was wakened up 15 minutes after the bells by fireworks. They didn't last long, luckily, or I'd have had what I still think of as a Mary Woodrow moment. Mary owned the newsagent's in Main Street Bowmore many years ago and lived above the shop. When the local lads used the street outside her shop to practise their handbrake turns of an evening, she would give them half an hour's fun and then she'd be out in the middle of the street, a sight to see in her nightie and dressing gown, shouting abuse. So here I am nearly three hours later, wide awake. And I'm in no rush to go back to bed because when I wake up it will still be New Year's Day.

I hate New Year's Day. Have done for years. It reminds me of what Scotland was like when the Church of Scotland controlled the Sunday shop opening times. Well, I don't suppose they did but it felt that way. Sunday used to spread in front of us like a desert. It got a wee bit better in the 70s and 80s but I can still remember getting a row from my granny in the 50s for skipping down the street on a Sunday. A lot of folk had the weekend off and, after spending Saturday running the weans to the dancing class or football practice, they couldn't use their Sunday to do boring stuff like food shopping or exciting stuff like having a Morrison's all day breakfast after the shopping. Not for them the thrill of picking up DIY supplies at B&Q. Because everything was shut.

I got a reminder of what it was like 'in the olden days' in Scotland when I went to Carlisle years ago and discovered the only shop open on a Sunday was Woolworth's. It was packed. Wonder what the good people of Cumbria do for entertainment of a Sunday nowadays?

I've been looking at tinternet and it seems 2017 has brought us not one but two New Year's Days. My favourite local pizzeria (Toni's in Fenwick Road since you ask) has posted a one-word message against both 1 and 2 January: OBSERVED. I suspect a lot of other local businesses will be the same.

But the supermarkets, which are not locally-owned and have never respected Scottish traditions are planning to open right through the holiday and that's a bit annoying. What do people have to buy on New Year's Day that they couldn't wait for till the next day so the staff could have at least one day off?

While we're about it: I do get annoyed when I see 'Bank Holiday Bargains' advertised in supermarkets in Scotland and then realise the bargains are in celebration of English bank holidays - ours are at a different time. I write to supermarkets about that, as I do about their failure to sell Scotch beef and lamb and Scottish fish and shellfish. All praise to Lidl and Aldi who do. I also write to them.

So till I get tired again, I'll just sit here and enjoy the Camino del Angel Malbec that someone gave me for Christmas. It's from the Valle Central in Chile - and Chile, I saw today, is going to be the destination for tourists in 2017. Some of us have already been, of course. Are we smug? Darn tootin.

The Herald

I've sent this to the Herald though they may not publish any part of it. 

Until the other week, I was the person on social media encouraging my fellow-independence voters to show respect to unionists, to avoid name-calling and to try to set up some form of dialogue with people we have to win over if Scotland is to gain independence. I’ve just given that up. The Scottish press is the reason, and in this the Herald must take particular responsibility because of its reach.

Your front page only ever seems to have three headlines:

-        Education in Scotland is a mess

-        The police service in Scotland is a mess

-        The NHS in Scotland is a mess.

These headlines attacking public services are recycled day after day. It is disappointing that the Herald shares the same characteristic as the BBC Scotland online news: the ability to pick up on issues that no other news outlet has identified as a problem. Not because these issues are ‘scoops’ but because they are by and large invented or irrelevant to the lives of people in Scotland. It’s worth saying here that most people don’t believe our public services are a mess – and from personal experience. Yes, there are problems, mainly financial, and we can disagree over how to resolve them but they can be resolved. And they are a bit more complicated than ‘SNP bad.’

Your letters pages are frankly poisonous. Few letter writers in favour of independence get space on these pages. I imagine a lot, like me, have given up trying to control the tide of unpleasantness and personal comment that now dominates them thanks to a handful of constant contributors. I admire Ruth Marr for her determination to keep writing. I have identified other writers who have an undeclared political agenda (for example, as former candidates for a particular political party) and I don’t even bother to read their letters.

The heraldcomment.com section seems to have been similarly taken over by unionists, some deluded and rarely challenged, others determined to turn every comment into an anti-SNP, and specifically anti-Sturgeon diatribe.

As for your Agenda column, all too often I know as soon as I see the headline and the name of the writer that the tone will be anti-Scottish. Today’s effort dedicated to mixed-ability teaching, while scattered with statistics, is written by a former university professor who shows little understanding of how schools work. Mixed-ability teaching isn’t new: teachers have been doing it successfully for 30 years or more. If there’s a problem with CfE, it’s not at Higher/National 5 level.

And please note: my objection is not that the Agenda writers are anti-SNP (I’m not SNP. I’m a Scottish Green), but that they keep on giving readers the idea that Scotland is a failing nation, that it can’t stand on its own two feet, that the only way forward is to abandon our current commitment to social democracy and – presumably - follow what is happening in the UK - and that includes leaving the EU.  

So for those of us who want independence, what do we do now? As I see it, we’ve been overtaken by the unionist anti-independence campaign, which has gone on while we pro-independence people were nodding. We must now go on the offensive, without waiting for the SNP government to declare a date for the second independence referendum. All the groups that operated before the 2014 vote need to swing into action. We need to start fund-raising. And we need to start challenging the misleading information appearing in the media.   

The BBC

It doesn't matter if you're a unionist or an independence supporter. I would like you to go to the National newspaper's website and read the interview given by Donalda MacKinnon, the newly-appointed director of the BBC in Scotland:

http://www.thenational.scot/

I met Ms MacKinnon a couple of times when I was working. I should really say I was in the same room as her, because I doubt if many people get past the BBC front: polite, obviously clever, discreet. She is BBC to her fingertips. She's a BBC civil servant, in with the bricks.

I wasn't expecting much from her statement. I didn't think she was going to fall to her knees and confess: the BBC Scotland news is terrible, full of couthy wee stories from round the country, with an over-dependence on outside (and sometimes unverified) sources like the right-wing press and the police, and too many pieces that reflect the editor's interests rather than the public's. The rest of the programming has also gone down the tubes in the last decade, with less commissioning of new work in drama, fewer comedies and documentaries that just don't reflect life in Scotland.

My friends in the SNP will tell you the BBC copies the right wing press by hammering away at public services in Scotland, particularly, education, the NHS and the police. You can judge that for yourself by watching their news and current affairs programmes.

We don't get news in Scotland from anywhere else in the world, so that people like me with an interest in comparing our lives to those of people in - say - the greater Europe - still - as we have done for almost twenty years - watch Eorpa in Gaelic.

Ms MacKinnon's statement reads for all the world like the kind of statement that the Tories under Thatcher and then Major used to issue when they were getting a hammering in the polls: the problem is, they used to say, the public just don't understand what we're trying to tell them. The message is being lost. The Labour party in Scotland took the same line when it lost the confidence of the Scottish public. Yes, Labour really did represent us. It really did have a lot to offer. It just wasn't managing to persuade us.

In the case of the Tories and Labour, the secret for some of us was: we'd heard their messages and we didn't like them. So we rejected them at the ballot box.

We don't have that power over the BBC. Yes, it has a panel of people from all over the UK to reflect the views of licence holders. Scotland has one representative on the BBC Board. It also has one representative on the BBC Trust. How do these people represent our views? I'm not sure. If there's a way to read the minutes of their meetings or to send them message like emails, I can't find it on the BBC website. In my view, the difference between political parties and the BBC isn't just that we can vote to get rid of politicians. It's very difficult to opt out of the BBC 'service.' We pay for the BBC. We have to, on pain of earning a criminal record if we refuse. People who don't have a TV and so don't need a TV licence find themselves constantly pursued as probable lawbreakers. It's a ridiculous situation which doesn't apply to any other public body in the UK.

I admit to having a bad track record with the BBC. I once tried to sign up as a member of the BBC Trust. I knew I wasn't likely to be accepted, but I wanted to know the process. I was directed to fill in the application form for employees. I filled in 11 pages - with some difficulty because it wanted every last detail of my academic background but, sadly, didn't leave room for me to explain that Scottish qualifications are different from English ones. With no sign of how many more pages were still to come, I gave up. I've also written to programme makers a couple of times asking why they took such and such an approach (usually a negative one) and have always got a reply - high-handed, smarmy, but at least a reply.

What I really miss in Ms MacKinnon's statement is any sign of an apology for letting us down. It's been evident for a long time now that the BBC isn't providing the service people want in Scotland. How does BBC Scotland get feedback on its programmes? There's a rumour there's a viewer/listener panel. How are members recruited? How do viewers find out what they're saying?

There are probably a lot of other questions. Why is the BBC budget so small when people in Scotland pay in so much? Is there a balance sheet showing how the money is spend? Can we see it? Who controls the news input? Glasgow or London? I hope it's London, because that would explain why the news and the late night BBC2 current affairs programmes are so bad.

And no, I'm not advocating getting rid of the BBC. I am in favour of making it accountable and being seen to be accountable to the people who pay for it.

The Red Army Choir

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/tragedy-hit-red-army-choir-a-fabled-symbol-of-ussr-and-russia-1641675

I know - they weren't called the Red Army Choir any more. It seems latterly they were called the Alexandrov Ensemble - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrov_Ensemble. But it doesn't matter what they were called. When their aircraft plunged today into the Black Sea today, killing 60 of them, the Red Army Choir was wiped out.

I am devastated by this loss, despite the fact that I only saw them perform live once, in Glasgow, and I find it hard to say why.

Okay, I studied Russian at one time and I know the Red Army Choir were seen as the front men for the USSR during the Cold War. But I grew up in a Socialist/Communist family which forgave Stalin a lot in the light of his defence of Europe against the Nazis. In my family, we admired the Red Army Choir and watched them on TV, and we respected people like Paul Robeson, a wonderful  singer, who was denied recognition because of his political (Commie) views.

The Red Army Choir to me represented the ordinary people of the USSR. I'm quite sure they weren't that ordinary but they sang and danced and were recruited from all over the USSR. The crash in the Black Sea is just awful.