"Wes Streeting urged households to ‘turn their heating on this weekend’"
Staggering, but not surprising. It's confusing for a "middle-aged geezer" like me. Did I actually spend most of my life in a world where people weren't constantly, repetitively, patronisingly informed of the bleeding ****ing obvious? Or is that just the beginnings of "old geezer syndrome" - the conviction that everything used to be better?
Yesterday I passed an advert-screen showing the revelatory headline "Arctic Blast Chills Britain"; complete with a picture of a snow-bound landscape, in case anyone is illiterate. Yeah. I know it's cold. I'm walking through it. But perhaps I didn't "know it", in some technical epistemological sense, until I was _told_ it.
("Good Morning Vietnam": Robin Williams, as the radio DJ, trying to get a weather report from his "weather correspondent" (also Robin Williams, of course), who's too busy "getting it on" to report:
- You got a window? Open it!
)
But people actually seem to _love_ being told what is the case. So many mediagenous (I just made up that word) "cases" of "whooping cough" recently in people I know (Narrator: of course they didn't have whooping cough - that was just the Media Thing a few weeks ago).
"It's worth reminding them that seasonal infections are more likely to occur at specific times of the year, usually due to changes in the weather or environment."
Sentences like this are why I keep coming back to read TTE.
Even worse, we have a "Cold Health Alert" which seems to come into force whenever temperatures drop to what I would consider a normal chilly winter's day. A family member in Hertfordshire has cancelled a family meet up due to take place today - "Because of the cold, you see, the NHS has told us not to leave the house". It's plus 12 degrees there today, admittedly a lot colder yesterday and tomorrow but still above zero and no snow forecast.
Of course in February we will no doubt be told it was the warmest January on record...
Can't we all club together and buy Hugh Pym, BBC health correspondent, a subscription to TTE because the poor chap is stuck in an ever-repeating episode of annual quad/flu/bird hospitals are full groove? He is either not very well informed or someone has written his script..........
What you need to realise is that all this is UNPRECEDENTED. There has never been a "Flu" outbreak before, it has never been as hot (nor as cold) before.
If they are busy in the NHS, what will they do when all the hypothermia and broken bones) cases flock in whist staff are unable to get to the hospital because of a bit of snow? Then, in week or two, a terrible scourge of Hay Fever hits us!
And that's not even he worst. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations has told us the oceans will soon boil!
I know I was a reasonably observenant young nurse, but I don't remember this annual panic on the wards. Yes if you worked on medical wards you may have seen a sudden increase in my case of young children that we now might recognise as RSV ,but not much else. I am not alone nursing friends of my era concur. I remember football matches cancelled due to team having a lot of players out with "flu". I did look at the BBC online news page, nothing that is actual news. Weather and a lot of fluff pieces. So don't expect anything that is correct or searching out of this sadly defunct organisation.
Being someone who tends to see a conspiracy everywhere I can't help but think the Department of Health and Social Care have a serious interest in sowing confusion about health policy. We spend an all time record percentage of GDP here but seem to have an all time poor service. The DOHSC want us to blame flu and austerity. This isn't altogether true.
The route cause is the failure to properly fund social and community care and divert support to the very expensive and waistful hospital service. The core of this problem is the private finance initiative (PFI) which sucks money out of the service at a horrifying rate and limits the quality of social and community care and the number of available hospital beds.
PFI contracts typically run for 25–30 years, and most contracts expire in the late 2030s or early 2040s. In 2022/23, the annual PFI repayment was £2.37 billion. Since 1998 PFI has cost the NHS an estimated £80 billion for a delivery of infrastructure worth about £13 billion but so far we have only paid around a third of the £80 billion bill.
The IPPR think tank calls for the end of the PFI, describing it as a "toxic" legacy. The report says capital investment has ‘fallen off a cliff’ as trusts have been forced to re-allocate long-term capital to pay PFI bills. It's a serious scandel on a par with the Post Office or Grenfell.
"Wes Streeting urged households to ‘turn their heating on this weekend’"
Staggering, but not surprising. It's confusing for a "middle-aged geezer" like me. Did I actually spend most of my life in a world where people weren't constantly, repetitively, patronisingly informed of the bleeding ****ing obvious? Or is that just the beginnings of "old geezer syndrome" - the conviction that everything used to be better?
Yesterday I passed an advert-screen showing the revelatory headline "Arctic Blast Chills Britain"; complete with a picture of a snow-bound landscape, in case anyone is illiterate. Yeah. I know it's cold. I'm walking through it. But perhaps I didn't "know it", in some technical epistemological sense, until I was _told_ it.
("Good Morning Vietnam": Robin Williams, as the radio DJ, trying to get a weather report from his "weather correspondent" (also Robin Williams, of course), who's too busy "getting it on" to report:
- You got a window? Open it!
)
But people actually seem to _love_ being told what is the case. So many mediagenous (I just made up that word) "cases" of "whooping cough" recently in people I know (Narrator: of course they didn't have whooping cough - that was just the Media Thing a few weeks ago).
"It's worth reminding them that seasonal infections are more likely to occur at specific times of the year, usually due to changes in the weather or environment."
Sentences like this are why I keep coming back to read TTE.
Even worse, we have a "Cold Health Alert" which seems to come into force whenever temperatures drop to what I would consider a normal chilly winter's day. A family member in Hertfordshire has cancelled a family meet up due to take place today - "Because of the cold, you see, the NHS has told us not to leave the house". It's plus 12 degrees there today, admittedly a lot colder yesterday and tomorrow but still above zero and no snow forecast.
Of course in February we will no doubt be told it was the warmest January on record...
Can't we all club together and buy Hugh Pym, BBC health correspondent, a subscription to TTE because the poor chap is stuck in an ever-repeating episode of annual quad/flu/bird hospitals are full groove? He is either not very well informed or someone has written his script..........
What you need to realise is that all this is UNPRECEDENTED. There has never been a "Flu" outbreak before, it has never been as hot (nor as cold) before.
If they are busy in the NHS, what will they do when all the hypothermia and broken bones) cases flock in whist staff are unable to get to the hospital because of a bit of snow? Then, in week or two, a terrible scourge of Hay Fever hits us!
And that's not even he worst. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations has told us the oceans will soon boil!
How exciting!
I know I was a reasonably observenant young nurse, but I don't remember this annual panic on the wards. Yes if you worked on medical wards you may have seen a sudden increase in my case of young children that we now might recognise as RSV ,but not much else. I am not alone nursing friends of my era concur. I remember football matches cancelled due to team having a lot of players out with "flu". I did look at the BBC online news page, nothing that is actual news. Weather and a lot of fluff pieces. So don't expect anything that is correct or searching out of this sadly defunct organisation.
Being someone who tends to see a conspiracy everywhere I can't help but think the Department of Health and Social Care have a serious interest in sowing confusion about health policy. We spend an all time record percentage of GDP here but seem to have an all time poor service. The DOHSC want us to blame flu and austerity. This isn't altogether true.
The route cause is the failure to properly fund social and community care and divert support to the very expensive and waistful hospital service. The core of this problem is the private finance initiative (PFI) which sucks money out of the service at a horrifying rate and limits the quality of social and community care and the number of available hospital beds.
PFI contracts typically run for 25–30 years, and most contracts expire in the late 2030s or early 2040s. In 2022/23, the annual PFI repayment was £2.37 billion. Since 1998 PFI has cost the NHS an estimated £80 billion for a delivery of infrastructure worth about £13 billion but so far we have only paid around a third of the £80 billion bill.
The IPPR think tank calls for the end of the PFI, describing it as a "toxic" legacy. The report says capital investment has ‘fallen off a cliff’ as trusts have been forced to re-allocate long-term capital to pay PFI bills. It's a serious scandel on a par with the Post Office or Grenfell.