Health
A new 60-day prescription policy may halve your visits to the GP and pharmacy
The changes will be particularly helpful for women living with conditions including epilepsy, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and more. Are you a young woman who deals with a complex and ongoing medical condition or several at the same time? Me too. In fact, it’s something a lot more of us go Continue reading »
How many more tragedies? Sydney siders in disbelief as they lay flowers
Our society is failing the seriously mentally ill. In the wake of the Bondi junction shopping centre attack, reporters expressed surprise that a person with a serious mental health illness could be living in cars and hostels. Ask anyone in mental health services they will tell you it’s common for people with serious mental illness Continue reading »
55th Birthday
One really should stop for a drink when one gets busy…
It was my 55th Birthday yesterday. I was ever-so-slightly stereotypically depressed about it. The night before I was kept awake not by the deep philosophical problems that beset humanity, it was constipation. I had a pain across my gut from a day of dehydration, easily done when living in the dry heat of Broken Hill. I could not poop or fart which would have helped. So I started day one of my 56th year drinking copious amounts of water which eventually got things moving again. Welcome to old fartdom, a time for obsessing over bowels, fibre and roughage.
Later in the afternoon I watched The Game Changers on Netflix (magnet link). I was surprised to see some actual sensible advice making it into the mainstream. As a teen at school I became convinced by George Bernard Shaw’s ethical views on not eating meat. Nonetheless I hypocritically continued to eat meat due to my own laziness and dislike of continual explanations to vexatious people. I wish I had read Georges response when questioned,
“Why are you a Vegetarian?” I began.
“Oh, come, Mr. Blathwayt! That boot Is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and in-human? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house? I am a Vegetarian, as Hamlet puts it, after my own honor and dignity, My practice justifles itself. I have no further reason to give for it“.
What Vegetarianism Really Means: A Talk with Mr. Bernard Shaw
by Raymond Blathwayt
Yeah, fuck you Mr Blathwayt! Go strap a burnt badger corpse to your face!
I think most of us are social creatures who prefer to avoid confrontation. We really should try to take notice of those annoying yet ethically and scientifically correct people who choose plant-based diets over the eating of animals. The Game Changers was clear and not annoying. I hope it convinces a lot of people. It really is time we stopped being so dumb and when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘I’.
Happy Birthday to me.
Aged care funding: On the road to entrenched inequity
UK Health Minister Aneurin Bevan introduced the National Health Service (NHS) pointing out that “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.” Advancing age brings with it infirmity and a Continue reading »
There is no simple fix to residential aged care
Aged care staff are unhappy and many older people in residential aged care are unhappy. Certainly, the NSW Health Minister and the hospitals are unhappy because there are 600 people sitting in acute hospital beds who could be in aged care facilities. Unfortunately, there are no appropriate places for them as their problems and behaviours Continue reading »
Environment: Australia publishes its first climate risk assessment
Australia is conducting its first climate risk assessment and developing an adaptation plan. Not only humans experience heat stress, so do other animals and plants. If you must feed wild birds, listen to the experts’ tips. Assessing Australia’s climate risks The Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) has released the Continue reading »
Commonwealth-State health reform: It’s time for a conversation about national priorities
The prospects for significant health reform looked good at the end of 2023. A mid-term review of the main Commonwealth-state agreement – the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA) – had recommended that the focus of a new agreement, due mid-2025, should be broader than public hospital funding. States seemed to be on board and the Continue reading »
‘Media Attacks on NHS Translation and Diversity Spending Completely Miss the Point of the Health Service’
This week, the Express published an article headlined 'taxpayers billed £100 million for NHS translators – could pay for 3,000 nurses'. The story completely missed the point of what the health service does.
The standfirst went on to explain that taxpayers "pick up the bill" for translation and interpretation" to ensure that the NHS can be "accessed in languages other than English”.
Given health and healthcare access inequalities, surely spending money to ensure people get the right care they need is a good thing – not to mention a legal requirement.
The Express article published on 2 April about NHS spending on translators
The Express packaged the story to suggest that it had uncovered a scandal. It included data revealed through Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) to 251 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards, which “routinely convert standard hospital and health literature into languages including Romanian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi”.
The article included comments from a Reform Party spokesman, claiming that translation and interpretation services "were simply not necessary" and that artificial intelligence apps, such as Google Translate, could do the job – or that patients could use family members to translate for them.
The Express article followed the Mail’s report last week on National Trust cafés selling “woke scones” (made with margarine and not butter). It was another example of 'stories’ aimed at stirring up problems, rather than solving them.
The Mail article published on 31 March on 'woke scones'
Helping those in need be heard appears to be a bizarre issue to weaponise in manufactured 'culture wars’.
For starters, the total NHS spend in England for the last financial year was more than £180 billion, with a further £20 billion in local government spending on social care. So £100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.
Citizens or legal residents who don’t speak fluent or even basic English are, just like people with hearing loss, learning disabilities or cognitive impairment, as entitled to NHS care as the rest of the population. And there is already considerable evidence that they are not getting it, with health and healthcare access inequalities between different ethnic communities.
Denying people written information in their own language will only make matters worse.
When people who are sick, scared, vulnerable, distressed or have symptoms to discuss, treatments to understand, or complex psychosocial factors to explain, how can the quality and safety of the care they receive be improved if they can neither express nor understand key information?
There are also legal considerations. To provide valid consent to treatment in common law, patients must have sufficient information about the details, risks, potential harms and benefits of a proposed treatment (which could in some cases involve major surgery, powerful drugs or admission to intensive care). Language barriers must be overcome to make this a reality.
The Mental Capacity Act states that all reasonable efforts must be made to establish decision-specific capacity for treatment or care – which may include overcoming language barriers.
If patients lack capacity, then speaking to those closest to them is a key part of establishing their best interests for further decision-making. Again, this may require translators or clear written information in their first language. We do this for people with hearing loss via written communication or sign language.
Regulatory codes of practice for healthcare professionals are also clear that we must treat people equally, irrespective of characteristics including race, religion or nationality.
Using AI translation apps of variable reliability has its limits in a time-critical or emotionally-charged and challenging situation. And relying on family or friends to translate isn't always possible as not every patient is accompanied. If they are discussing personally sensitive or intimate information, they may be inhibited from doing so. If there are safeguarding concerns regarding abuse or neglect one could suspect the person translating of being coercive when doing so.
The thinly-veiled xenophobia and racism being whipped up by the Express (even against people who pay tax and National Insurance contributions and have precisely the same entitlement to care as native and confident English speakers) is part of a wider set of 'wedge issues’ being pushed by right-wing media outlets and sections of the Conservative and Reform parties.
They share a similar fixation with 'woke’ diversity managers or diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the NHS or other public services. Several Government ministers have lined up to call for a 'war on waste’ to remove such posts and policies.
Steve Barclay, when Health Secretary in 2023, wrote to integrated care boards in England instructing them to stop recruiting staff as dedicated EDI managers, arguing that the money should be spent on “frontline staff” instead.
The Express has published a number of articles lamenting 'wokery’ in the NHS – including, in January in a story headlined 'NHS spends £40 million on woke non-jobs that could pay for 1,150 nurses'.
Last year, the Spectator ran a FOI-based story showing that, out of an NHS workforce of around 1.5 million people, there were only 800 employees in dedicated EDI roles – yet called for those roles to be abolished.
Again, those employed in such posts account for a small fraction of 1% of the entire NHS workforce or spend. Their presence is de facto required due to the Equality Act and Equality Duty on public organisations and protections in employment law.
NHS organisations do have a very diverse workforce, yet there is clear evidence of ongoing and endemic discrimination towards minorities within it. There is also consistent evidence of discrimination and care inequalities between different ethnic and socio-economic groups the NHS serves.
The idea that a focus on EDI is somehow a bad thing and a distraction from real work, or that organisations should not employ a small number of people to oversee it, is not so much a dog-whistle as a wolf-klaxon. It is a classic distraction from the real issue – the 14 years of Conservative-led mismanagement of health and social care and of wider public health.
This decline has been well-documented by the Institute for Government think tank; as well former King’s Fund chief executive Professor Sir Chris Ham, who set out in expert detail the rise and decline of the service from the late 1990s through to the 2010 election and the current crisis in performance and public satisfaction.
Blaming our NHS crisis on the cost of translation and interpretation services, and diversity and inclusion managers, foments hostility against people from ethnic minorities, white people with poor English skills, and even those with full entitlement to use our public services and who contribute towards their costs.
They aren’t all rich enough to pay for their own personal translator or digitally equipped enough to auto-translate NHS information documents into their own languages.
I don’t see commentators on the right arguing against hospitals in France or Spain finding translations for ill white British expats or embassies around the world employing translators to help British citizens who have found themselves in a spot of bother with the local law. I wonder why.
Managerialism is crushing the human connection: The care economy series
Unpacking the care economy, Dr Robbie Lloyd investigates some of the key issues impacting our communities in a series of articles that explore ageing, disability, mental health reform, the challenges of health policy and reform, drugs and alcohol and domestic family violence. (A repost from 2023). Crushing the human connection: Managerialism does not deliver good Continue reading »
Exclusive: Graham attacks ‘phony’ old Unite member nos – that she managed
Union general secretary’s ‘unhinged’ letter to staff, officers and organisers continues to backfire as insiders say numbers she is now attacking were part of her job to report
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham’s bizarre letter to all the union’s staff last week, attempting to undermine a number of criticism that have been levelled at her and her management of the union, was described by union insiders as ‘unhinged’ and a ‘rant’ – and it continues to backfire.
As Skwawkbox has already covered, Graham told recipients that the union under her will always prioritise jobs in the weapons industry above the fight to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Her letter also claimed that an unfavourable interim financial report had been faked wholesale and that the forger had gone to the extent of copying the font and layout of actual reports to fool members. The union did not respond to an enquiry whether it stood by the claim despite the screenshots of the report appearing to show that it was found on the union’s official ‘Sharepoint’ network. The letter also claimed the union’s financial value was ‘pushing up towards half a billion pounds’ – but insiders say that the value was already around half a billion when she took over two and a half years ago.
And another issue with Graham’s claims has arisen – relating to Unite’s membership figures. In an apparent attempt to refute union insiders’ claims that membership has fallen by more than two hundred thousand during her tenure, Graham wrote:
Despite inheriting membership figures that included 32,000 members on union funded subs (essentially free) and dealing with a 60,000 loss in aviation and other areas during Covid, the work we have all put in collectively has recouped these loses and more. Furthermore, we recorded an additional 16,647 net membership increase in 2023. These are real membership increases, not the phony [sic] figures of the past.
Emphasis added
One insider told Skwawkbox that the 32,000 ‘essentially free’ members were in fact members supported by Unite when they lost their jobs during the pandemic, so that they could retain their membership protections until they found new work.
But even more significantly, another said that before Ms Graham became general secretary, one of her key responsibilities as head of organising was to monitor and report on the membership – and that the membership figures before her tenure were therefore compiled and reported by her and her organising team.
The senior insider told Skwawkbox:
The figures she’s calling phoney are her own figures.
Skwawkbox wrote to Unite:
Another question with regard to Ms Graham’s email to officers, organisers and staff. This one concerns her claim of ‘phony [membership] figures of the past’. She wrote:
“Despite inheriting membership figures that included 32,000 members on union funded subs (essentially free) and dealing with a 60,000 loss in aviation and other areas during Covid, the work we have all put in collectively has recouped these loses and more. Furthermore, we recorded an additional 16,647 net membership increase in 2023. These are real membership increases, not the phony figures of the past.”
Ms Graham as head of organising was responsible for reporting membership figures to the general secretary and executive. Is she really saying that she submitted ‘phony’ [sic] numbers? By 5pm today, please.
At the time of writing, more than ninety minutes after the reply deadline provided as standard journalistic practice, no reply had been received from the union.
The outrage provoked by the letter is not the first time members have been angered over Sharon Graham’s position on Gaza. She has been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month.
Her tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in both an employment tribunal for discrimination and a defamation lawsuit brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
According to human rights group Euro Med Monitor, since 7 October last year Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than double that number, overwhelmingly women and children and many of them with life-changing injuries, while Gaza’s health and school systems have been bombed into collapse, often using US- and UK-made weapons and systems. More than a million people have been forcibly displaced and Gaza is in famine because of Israel’s blockade of food and vital supplies. Israel is formally on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice and ordered to stop its slaughter – and has been found by UN human rights investigators to be committing genocide.
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