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Exhausted? Of course I am.

Jeremy Hunt’s strategy seems to be to wear the striking junior doctors down with cuts and propaganda. Will it work?

I am, like many of my colleagues, indeed exhausted.

I’m exhausted of going to work to find huge gaps in the rota where doctors used to be, where nurses used to be, where physiotherapists and occupational therapists used to be. I’m tired of never seeing a contract, never being able to plan to see my family. I’m exhausted by the deaf ears of faceless administrators.

I’m tired of endless top-down reorganisation, target-chasing and publicity managing. I miss looking after patients. I miss training to be a better doctor.

I’m exhausted by the media. I was on BBC radio during the last strike, and a rather hostile presenter asked me “Why are you on strike? Why aren’t you doing your job?”. I gave a polite, measured answer. But I wanted to reply with; “I’m striking today to protect the long-term health of patients. That’s my job. But what about you and your fellow ‘journalists’? Are you doing ‘your job’? When a Secretary of State and Prime Minister can say anything and it is reported verbatim; unscrutinised, unchallenged and uninvestigated? When they can lie about stroke care, perinatal care, weekend hospital care, consultant cover, NHS funding, NHS safety and privatisation and barely any journalist will take the time to report the utter lack of credibility on any health issue in any way? I’m doing my job to the best of my ability- are you doing yours?”

Sigh.

I’m exhausted by the politics and the endless lies and spin. I’m tired of having to counter the same propaganda ad nauseum. A ‘seven-day NHS’ sounds great- but what is it? Is it urgent emergency care? We already have that. Is it routine care? We don’t need and can’t afford that- not when the NHS has never been poorer. Can we make it better? Of course- but we need investment, policy based on evidence not sentiments. Should I go to hospital at the weekend? Emphatically, categorically and unreservedly YES.

I’m sick of noxious columnists pumping out toxic nonsense; d’Ancona, Baxter, Lawson, Vine…the cogs of the Tory spin machine are many, and they are all dirty.

Most of all I’m exhausted by fighting for an NHS on the brink of destruction- whilst the public remains largely unmoved. When you go to the doctor and she tells you something is seriously wrong- how do you respond? Do you then go to the Daily Mail to fact check it? Do you ask for a balanced opinion from a close-to-government think tank, deeply invested in privatisation?

I’ll declare my vested interest right here; I’m a junior doctor and I think the NHS is the best healthcare system for my patients- in equity, in outcomes, in value for money. Now the junior doctors are striking, the GPs are resigning, the consultants are halfway between both. The student nurses are protesting, the staff nurses are planning, and pharmacies are closing. Meanwhile NHS services are already being sold- to Virgin, Circle, TDL. Domestic and domiciliary staff have been private for years already. PFI hospitals are £80 billion in debt for £10 billion of services – does that sound efficient to you?

The end of the NHS is here- not in five or ten years, but here, now, collapsing from August. Do you really believe this government is ‘the party of the NHS?’

Did you vote for this? Did you look at the Tory manifesto and read the pledge ‘Seven Day NHS’ and think- “That’s got my vote, now bulldoze the thing and where’s that private health insurance brochure?”

We haven’t explained ourselves properly and for that I wholeheartedly apologise. The junior contract is simply a means to make lucrative weekend work cheaper, and reduce the pay bill and pension bill on hospitals for private takeover. There really is no other reason to do what the government are doing. They don’t care about the safety of patients- they’ve cut hospital budgets in relative terms more deeply than at any time in NHS history, we have fewer doctors and spend a lower percentage of our GDP on healthcare than most of Europe, and they tried to suppress reports on safe staffing levels for nurses. They don’t even care about ‘balancing the books’- the NHS will be £2 billion in debt this year. The national debt in 2007 was £500 billion, now it’s £1.6 trillion. In 2007, the deficit was £41 billion – now it’s £90 billion. I hear your cries of ‘the financial crash’. Exactly- and here is the cost- years of private debt generated by illegal banking practices absorbed into the public purse. Banking and corporate tax evasion remain unchecked. The NHS and every other public service for sale. It’s a crime too huge to see.

I’m exhausted. Yes. And alone, perhaps, defeated. But I’m not alone. 250,000 doctors in this country, 400,000 nurses, 150,000 allied health professionals. 19 million families. 66 million people.

Dear other normal human beings, join us, and help save our NHS, if we can.

DOMINIC PIMENTA

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I love it when Twitter replies to Dave Twonk indeed

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Jeremy Hunt – TIMELINE OF SHAME

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11 February 2016: Jeremy Corbyn responding to Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that he will impose a contract on junior doctors

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Aw first attempt at some BSL Vlog editing.

What I found out about the Starkey Hearing Foundation: Hello British Deafies, let’s open this up!

Inspired by: @uncertifiednightmare ‘s original post via @fooBSL

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Disabled UK folks who like movies...

If you are over 8 and have proof of disability:

Disability Living Allowance (DLA);

Attendance Allowance (AA);

Blind Persons Registration;

Personal Independence Payment (PIP); or

Armed Forces Independence Payment (AFIP)

You can easily apply online for a card that lets you take a friend to the cinema for free. It costs £6.

You’ll need to upload a PDF of proof of the above, and you’ll need to upload a passport-style photo. Here’s what I did:

Took a photo on my phone against a plain white background with good lighting

Sent it to myself on Telegram so I could move the photo easily to my desktop computer!

Uploaded it to this website in my desktop browser, and used their interface thingy to resize and crop to make it meet passport regulation standards. This bit was easy peasy.

Took a screenshot so I didn’t have to pay for physical copies.

Then you can pay online by card, over the phone by card, or you can send them a cheque. You can also do the whole thing by post if you want.

Here’s the CEA Card website - go forth and enjoy a cheaper cinematic experience like non-disabled people get to have! :)

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UCLA Gymnast Sophina DeJesus: what a G

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Why do BSL Signed Songs piss me off so much?!

I should appreciate the value of it - the exposure YouTube and video medias give to sign language and the wider audience it can often reach. But I've seen enough badly signed SEE hearing wannabes to last a lifetime. There is never any cultural equivalence in these attempts at sign song. Just amateurs purporting to 'love' the language using it incredibly badly. My toes curl. Getting sign language awareness into the minds of the mass majority of course is a wonderful thing, just don't forget the Deaf community behind it. Beware supposed cultural ownership; promote Deaf rights, communication access and BSL!

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According to the Trussell Trust, its food banks have been used more than a million times in the 2014-15 financial year, a 19 per cent increase on the previous 12 months. And, lest we are in any doubt that this is directly linked to the coalition government’s policies targeting those on benefits, we just need to look at the increase in food banks themselves which have risen from 56 in 2010 to 445 in 2015 – an increase of almost 700 per cent. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of organisations providing emergency food assistance is estimated to be over 1,500 according to a 2014 parliamentary inquiry into hunger in the UK.

In a separate survey Trussell Trust found that 86 per cent of their food banks reported an increase in referrals due to benefit sanctions. Of these, 76 per cent said some or many of these sanctions were seemingly unfair.

Examples of these sanctions, provided in a Trussell Trust report to the Department of Work and Pensions, make interesting reading. Like the man who missed his benefit appointment because he was at hospital with his partner giving birth to a stillborn child; or the man who carried out 60 job searches but was sanctioned for the one he missed; or the couple who missed their appointment because the DWP was sending letters to the wrong address; the man who missed an appointment due to a heart attack; or the young man with learning difficulties who wrote: “My money keeps getting stopped for some reason and I don’t know why”.

Most of these stories point to the same reasons for benefit sanctions: lack of money for transport; lack of access to computers, phones or the internet; missed appointments for valid reasons; and DWP cock ups. It hardly needs saying that punishing someone who is poor for not having a computer or a phone isn’t fair.

Read complete article…

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The conservative case against Iain Duncan Smith

Exhibit A: Wasting public money

You are against that, aren’t you? Didn’t you go into politics to protect abused taxpayers? Not when your own people are the abusers, apparently.

The Universal Credit fiasco exemplifies Duncan Smith’s narcissistic failure to admit and remedy mistakes. As Computer Weekly — a far better guardian of the taxpayer than the Conservative backbenches or press, incidentally – has said, Duncan Smith proceeded with a vast and complicated IT project without learning the lessons from the IT disasters of the Labour years.

The inevitable result, as Labour said today, is that after ‘£612m [was] spent, including £131m written off or “written down”, the introduction of Universal Credit is now years behind schedule, with no clear plan for how, when, or whether full implementation will be achievable or value for money’.

Duncan Smith did not take responsibility for his actions. He did not scrap his failing system and start again, as an honest man would have done it. The open acceptance of a mistake would have left him vulnerable. Maybe all those mocking Conservatives, who dismissed his leadership as a joke in 2003, would have resurfaced and asked: If this man was unfit to lead the Conservative Party when it was in opposition, and had power over no one’s life, why should he now lead a spending ministry with the power to bring misery into the lives of millions?

It is a good question, after all. And some of us would like to hear your answer. Computer Weekly reported that the Ministerial Oversight Group, which had to examine the Universal Credit mess, had two options: To throw away the IT developed by Duncan Smith’s suppliers, and start again; or to salvage as much as possible in the short term, while developing a new ‘enhanced’ IT system.

[Francis] Maude favoured starting again, with the Government Digital Service (GDS) that he controls taking the lead. Duncan Smith felt that writing off so much IT was politically unacceptable.

Just so. Duncan Smith would have looked a fool if he had scrapped his project. His career might have been in danger. So he dodged the choice, and hid the losses by making the public pay two computer systems, while using government lawyers to stop the gory details of the failure seeing daylight. The eventual bill to the public will be the cost of saving his face. Significantly, Computer Weekly reports that the Government Digital Service (GDS) wants no more direct involvement with the development of the ‘enhanced IT’ required to roll out universal credit. The GDS is one of the successes of this administration. Engineers praise its staff for learning from the mistakes of the past and ensuring that – after all these years – Whitehall keeps IT costs under control. That its public servants want as little as possible to do with Duncan Smith tells you all you need to know about his inability to put the taxpayers’ interest first.

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AND WHY: In Secrets were Harry and Fudge eating pea soup…crumpet copyright?

i get so pissed off when people accuse harry potter fans of over-criticizing the movies because the directors:

fucked up ronald weasley’s entire character

made hermione perfect because obviously the only way an audience can appreciate a female character is if she has no flaws 

destroyed ginny weasley’s personality when she happens to be the main character’s love interest

white-washed most of the main cast when 2/3 of the golden trio could have been people of color

screwed up the MAIN VILLAIN’S DEATH in a way that undermines the entire point of his character

conveniently left out regulus black’s entire storyline and contributed to the problematic idea that being a slytherin and valuing ambition and cunning automatically makes you a dirty evil person

yes, they messed up a lot of little things but they also messed up huge, plot-changing, point-missing, life-killing things so please never tell a harry potter fan that they’re too picky when the directors missed 70% of the big picture

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The first of 5 NHS awareness films made for the sell out NHS in Stitches comedy show at the Hackney Empire on 28th March 2015.

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Agree.

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Profit-driven firms have been winning far more NHS contracts than ministers admit and privatisation has increased significantly under the coalition government, the latest evidence shows.

Two new sets of figures, detailing who is being awarded contracts to provide NHS clinical services, both challenge the government’s claim that only 6% of the service’s budget goes to private firms.

Contracts monitored by the NHS Support Federation campaign group show that private firms won £3.54bn of £9.628bn worth of deals awarded in England last year – a win rate of 36.8%.

And responses from GP-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to a Labour freedom of information request reveal that private firms have been winning 40% of contracts CCGs have put out to tender, worth a total of £2.3bn, only slightly fewer than the 41% awarded to NHS bodies.

Labour also claim that NHS patients have had to endure longer waits for treatment as NHS hospitals have increasingly maximised their income from private patients, the number of which has gone up by as much as 58% since 2010. The NHS will end up as “a two-tier service”, with those paying privately being prioritised over other patients, unless action is taken to reverse the trend, the party claims.

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said the figures it had collated “demolish [David] Cameron’s claim that there’s only been a modest increase in privatisation on his watch. The truth is there has been a sharp increase and the public has never been asked whether they want the NHS to go in this direction.”

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The world is a mean place, so I’m bringing this picture back.

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What I wish the hearing world could understand about deaf people

-Article from Deaf ASL instructor Jenn Hearn

As a small child at a mainstream hearing school, I remember sitting around the lunch table while my hearing peers told stories. I could not follow what was being said, so I just laughed when they laughed and frowned when they did.

After years of speech therapy, I still felt totally isolated. Even then I knew that it was not fair that I had to work so hard to learn to speak like a hearing person, only to be isolated by my deafness in social settings.

Sadly, this is a very common experience among hearing impaired people. We often wonder, shouldn’t communication be a two-way street?

I finally got the opportunity in high school to attend a School for the Deaf. Ironically, once I learned American Sign Language, it was then that I felt the least “deaf” and “impaired” than I ever did in the hearing world.

With the communication barriers broken down, I felt like I finally truly belonged somewhere. My personality flourished, and I got to see that while quiet and shy around hearing people, I am vibrant and outgoing around Deaf peers.

Some Deaf people are angry. Only a small percentage of us are born into the Deaf world, the rest have to struggle with our identity and communication barriers throughout our lives.

Growing up, some of us are subjected to years of embarrassing and tedious speech therapy, only to be made fun of for our voices that we worked so hard to acquire.

We master lip-reading, only to be left out of conversations repeatedly. We are given cochlear implants as if it is the cure for all of our woes, yet we still are, and always will be, deaf.

Some of our Deaf peers have been brutally beaten or even killed whenever officers misinterpret our signing as an attempt to resist arrest, or mistake our hard-earned clear voices as a sign that we can actually hear their demands as well.

Some of us have been treated as inconveniences when we pull directly up to the window to order our food or coffee. Some of us have been misdiagnosed with metal health issues we do not have, and in some cases we are given medication for the wrong conditions, locked away in mental health hospitals for years, or denied treatment altogether for conditions we DO have.

This is partially the result of diagnostic tools being designed for patients with spoken language and administered by those who are not well-versed in Deaf culture norms.

Some of us are still denied accommodations or given unqualified interpreters in educational, legal, professional, and medical situations, sometimes with far-reaching or deadly consequences which can change the course of lives and the lives of our loved ones.

We Deaf are less likely to be given leadership roles or denied the jobs we apply for. Yes, some of us are angry.

We are born into a world which we are not completely equipped to fit into, a world designed for those who can hear. Even so, we are amazing.

We have our own unique collectivist culture and Signed Languages. We have fellow Deaf peers in the White House, or working as dentist, authors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, and professors.

We are great mothers, fathers, friends, and any other role that can be found in the hearing world. We have a unique perspective on life and a richness of character that comes from our years of struggling with communication barriers and our identity. If only the hearing world could understand this.

The hearing world can do many things to make our world more Deaf-friendly. They can take the time to learn how to accommodate us, and follow through with it. Know that our ability to speak is not always an accurate assessment of how much we can hear.

Police officers and other professional organizations need to make Deaf sensitivity training a part of their core education. Hearing parents of deaf children, help your child find his/her own identity instead of assigning one to them.

At the very least, please do not teach them that those who sign are failures, or that those who choose to learn speech are less Deaf. Take the time to learn about our culture and language. Doing these things is a great start toward making the modern Deaf experience into a more positive one for us.