Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

Filed under: nhs

Tear down this Bill, Mr Lansley

written on Tuesday 14 February 2012 and filed under [drop the bill] [nhs] [politics]

The government's epetitions website is meant to be a place that we subjects can blow off a little steam without actually bothering our lords and masters.

That, however, isn't to say it isn't useful for those of us who want to take back parliament from the vested interests that are now running the show. When 100,000 people sign a petition, MPs have to look into having a debate about it - getting our voice into parliament, something many MPs (my own, Fester McVague, in particular) feel they were elected to prevent.

So here's a petition that can make a difference, even if the result is only to bolster the ineffective opposition parties and shake the smug, self-satisfied consciences of the Liberal Democrat MPs who have let power go to their heads and their hearts.

If you're a British resident, visit the Drop the NHS Reforms Bill epetition now - at the time of writing, it's agonisingly close to the 100,000 signatures needed to force a debate, most of which were gained today.

Whatever you vote, and I don't presume to know what goes on between you and a (secret) ballot box, if you're British you have reason to be grateful for our NHS. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's ours and it's run by people who are doing it for love not money, for people regardless of what they can or should be asked to pay. And it is ours, not the government's, not big business's, not Lansley's, not anyone's. The NHS is ours and we need to stop it being privatised by stealth.

On being a Whoer

written on Saturday 23 April 2011 and filed under [doctor who] [nhs] [television]

He's back... and it's about time. The new series of Doctor Who starts tonight and I am unreasonably excited, as I have been for nearly every new series since about 1981.

My earliest memory of watching Doctor Who is accidentally stumbling upon Warriors' Gate in 1981. I must've come in part way through an episode part way through the adventure, but I was instantly and irredeemably hooked. Then, a couple of months later, the Doctor fell from Jodrell Bank and turned into a completely different person. From that moment, I ceased to be hooked and became obsessed.

I think this works the same for all fans of Doctor Who. They enjoy the series until their first regeneration, at which point they become addicted to it. I remained addicted all through Peter Davison's tenure, despite the BBC moving the series to somewhere harder to find in the schedules. I even gave up a club I went to on Monday evenings with my best friend of the time in favour of watching the show.

I stuck with the series through Colin Baker's time, although by this point the series was beginning to flag, even for me. No fault of Colin Baker - a fine actor to this day - but the series was clearly unloved by the BBC and needed a rest and a change of production management. In the BBC of the day, only the pause was possible, and the series disappeared in 1985 for a year and a half, but sadly returned with a smaller budget and the same tired executives in place. I stuck with it.

The Doctor regenerated again, and Sylvester McCoy, a truly great Doctor, appeared. The series was freshened up and really started to catch fire again. So the BBC cancelled it.

Seven years passed and I moved on to other interests - Star Trek: The Next Generation launched and I got obsessed with that instead. The BBC tried again with a one-off backdoor pilot for a new Doctor Who, made in Canada, but it relied on (a) money from Fox that wasn't forthcoming and (b) intimate knowledge of the show's backstory mixed with the ability to ignore the places where they had changed that same story. So that wasn't going to work.

Time passes, and in 2004 the BBC announced that the show was coming back. It didn't sound hopeful: it was to be made in south Wales, of all places, written by a guy best known for comedy and children's TV, and starring a teenypop girly singer known as "Billie". Still, I'll watch it, I thought, if only for the nostalgia.

In the run-up to it going out for the first time, I had actually started to get excited, even while doubting that it could be as good as I remembered (if you go back and watch episodes of stuff you enjoyed as a kid, it is often surprisingly dull). On Saturday 26 March 2005 I popped to my doctor to have a blood test, with plans to nip to Sainsbury's to buy booze and snackfood to consume in front of the TV that night.

At 7pm on that Saturday, I was lying in a hospital bed, having 4 pints of blood put into me. Something had gone terribly wrong. I hurriedly paid for the terrible Patientline service to get BBC-1. I was foiled: during the title sequence, the junior doctor arrived, and having heard me say how I'd been waiting for this moment for 9 years, announced that this was the only time she had available to perform some tests. These tests involved looking up bum, which made watching TV difficult, and it would've been nice if she'd bothered to close the curtain around the bed, but when you're ill, the NHS makes you better in return for your dignity. (I later learnt that the hospital had decided that, since I was bleeding to death internally and would ultimately need a large, murderously-inclined part of my bowel removing, it was obviously my own fault because I was a filthy queer - hence the, er, less-than-caring attitude of the staff. Once I was well, I had to take action against them. I won)

Still, I watched the rest of the series as my life ebbed away. The new series was brilliant. Wales is a great place to make television, it turns out, with some of the most talented production crews in the entire world - that shouldn't surprise a Welshman like me, but there we are. Russell T Davies, that comedy and children's writer, had also written Queer as Folk, the series that directly brought about a change in society's attitudes to homosexuality and relaunched serial drama as a television phenomena. The series was more than safe in his hands: it was in perfect hands. And Billie, teenybopper, was actually Billie Piper, award-winning actress of real talent.

Time passed, I was cured, and I kept watching as the 'new' Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, regenerated into the newer David Tennant (I cried), then through Tennant's years in the role, falling deeply in love with his Doctor. And then he regenerated (I cried for days and still do if I see the regeneration scene) and Matt Smith took over, after - correcting the injustices of the past - a decent break that built expectations and a change in production management that kept the format fresh (and brought another comedy/children's writer to the helm, the equally brilliant Steven Moffat).

Tonight is the second series of Matt Smith's Doctor Who. I'm not in love with the 11th Doctor in the sexually-perverted way I was with the 10th (although I'm nursing a crush that could squash him) but I'm just as excited as I was in 2005, and in 1981. That is effectively forever in television terms, which shows the true power of a format invented back in 1963 by Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert. For the ball-and-chain, who saw the first ever episode go out the day after JFK was assassinated and was also instantly hooked, the excitement is no different, even almost 50 years later.

So tonight, I'm buying the booze, he's buying the Chinese takeaway and we're sitting down in front of BBC One HD at 6pm.

I have no blood tests planned.

Andrew Lansley, dangerous idiot

written on Wednesday 20 April 2011 and filed under [health] [nhs] [politics]

Andrew-lansley-006

When the Tories came to power (yeah, whatever), the party faithful and the new MPs were the most right-wing they had been in their entire history. They've liberalised their views on some social issues (they're now pro-gay, they say, although they still hate single mothers and other social deviants) but economically, they're neo-conservatives in the George W Bush/Tea Party stylee.

Unlike the neo-cons in the US, they know that the British people are basically centrist, so they have done a good job of hiding the breadth of their plans for selling public services to their friends in big business. We Brits don't tend to like that type of thing.

With the NHS, the Tory plan seems to have tested well in focus groups before the election. In broad terms, it does indeed sound good. Instead of remote boards and faceless managers deciding everything, the job will be handed to your friendly, cheerful, local GP to do. And, if he won't do it, well, don't worry, other groups (private businesses, but we won't say that loudly) can do it. All's well.

Except it isn't. This is a radical switch in power from those with a lot of knowledge to those with none. By making hospitals dance to the GPs' tune, the experts - specialists, consultants, nurses - in given diseases will have to do what the GP - general, jack-of-all-trades - wants them to do. And I've just experienced this.

I've been having tests at a local hospital. They're all negative. Yesterday, I saw the specialist and she was downright hostile. Why, she demanded, was I wanting all of these pointless tests? What was I trying to prove? Well, nothing. I didn't want any of the tests. My GP wanted me to have them. I really don't have the medical knowledge to decide whether the GP is seeking pointless tests or not.

She pushed further into my notes and wondered if they were incomplete. Did I know what the results were for such-and-such a test? Did I know what level something-or-other was at? No, I didn't, because I'd never had those tests. My GP had seized upon one symptom and was having the hospital probe that symptom over and over again; what he wasn't doing was attempting to find a root cause for all the symptoms. He hadn't stopped and looked at the whole body, he'd skipped to the likeliest outcome based on one symptom and passed me on to the hospital, rather than paying for the actually-needed other tests.

The specialist at the hospital will now be writing him a stern letter, reminding him to do his job fully first in future.

And here's the rub: when Andrew Lansley's "reforms" to the NHS go through, the specialist will never again be able to write such a letter. The power will move from her, with her a-lot-about-a-little knowledge, to the GP, with his a-little-about-a-lot way of working. The hospital will have to keep performing the pointless tests on one symptom until the GP is satisfied. The patient - me - gets a worse deal than ever, being poked and prodded and taking time off work for tests that aren't needed. The GP gets to make expensive financial decisions in the 4-minute slot allocated to each patient every day along with the medical decisions that we'd rather he made in that tiny time. The specialist doesn't get to specialise; the generalist has to do the impossible and get more specialised about more and more generalities.

This is all bad. Give me a remote, faceless bureaucracy any day.