What’s Your Beef with the NHS?

So two stories have dominated the news recently: horse meat in cheap beef products and failings in a hospital trust.

The supermarkets’ pressure on prices will always mean quality will suffer and sourcing meat from the cheapest source was bound to cause problems. If you want to guarantee quality, use a local butcher with locally sourced organic meat. You’ll taste the difference and help keep small businesses and your High Street alive.

The NHS story ignores the main problem with the NHS: fake management jobs. These layers of middle management with people doing nothing of any use to patients cost a lot of money – money that would be better spent on front line nursing.

I know of someone who skived off work for many months on a couple of occasions on full pay. Her work? Well there wasn’t any work to do in the first place so no-one missed her and nothing needed to be carried out by others working longer or harder.

It’s one of those jobs created for someone they can’t actually sack. They give it a job title with words like ”lead’ or ‘manager’ for someone who doesn’t actually lead or manage anyone. At most these people do reports about stuff that’s completely irrelevant and they sit in meetings to discuss producing these reports. Fake jobs. They report to Assistant Deputy Directors and the like. How many more tiers?

What is needed is a clear out of people who don’t actually contribute to patient care. Everyone should have to write a job description for their own position. What they do, the value that adds and how detrimental it would be to patients if they were sacked. Anyone with the term ‘lead’ or ‘manager’ should be able to show who they actually lead or manage and the benefit they bring.

And the people carrying out these reviews shouldn’t be other NHS Trust managers with vested interests like justifying their own jobs.

But no-one in Government has the balls to do it.

Corralejo Midday Run

So we took our running gear out to Fuerteventura but in the end only managed to do one run … at midday … in the heat and humidity. What do they say about mad dogs and Englishmen?

Wet and Windy

Just before Autumn arrived in Wigan, I ran my route again, made more difficult by the 50mph crosswind and the threat of rain. Here’s the fly-through:

In other news, Garmin have accepted my Forerunner 410 is faulty and it’s been sent back for exchange. We’ll see how long it takes…

Hot and Sweaty Run

I made the most of the last of the Indian Summer we’re enjoying at the moment to go for another run near the Premier Inn at Wigan (M6, J25).  The first mile is uphill which means a bit of an effort to start off with.

Because my Garmin Forerunner 410 has decided it doesn’t want to work, I’ve had to switch to using iMapMyRun on my iPhone, but the benefit is Google Earth fly-through:

4 Mile Thames Path Run

I decided that I should go for a quick run this afternoon to make up for a mahoosive meal at Nando’s in Epsom last night – we won’t mention the cake and jelly at IKEA Croydon {shudder} – and knowing that it’s pasta and partying tonight.

So I chose a nice and easy 2 mile jog. I felt fine a mile into the route so carried on, and the same after a mile and a half so I decided I’d head on to the 2 mile mark before turning back. Worked well, I think.

London Sky Ride

As part of my new fitness drive, I took part today in the London Sky Ride: a loop from Tower Bridge to St James’s Park and back plus the two miles or so each way along the Thames Path from my apartment to Tower Bridge. Here are the stats:

It was looking overcast when I left but by the time I reached Tower Bridge, it had started raining and by the time I was on the route itself it was lashing down. The route was still very busy indeed with many cyclists not being aware I was coming up behind them fairly swiftly despite the regular stops to allow pedestrians to cross. By the time I was halfway around the ‘course’, I was absolutely soaked to the skin and my canvas Adidas trainers were full of rainwater and squelching – eeyyoo!

Not quite sure how I managed speeds of 112.8mph – see charts – or a max. speed of 64.8mph – see summary – but the rest is pretty accurate!

On my way home, I had an ‘off’ on the now-slippery Thames Path, landing heavily on my bad shoulder and also banging my head on the block paviors. Maybe a bike helmet might be a good idea after all? I crashed with sufficient force to buckle the front rim too, so I’ll need to get that fixed soon too.