I was woken by my alarm
this morning; that rarely happens. I got up, and so did my dog. That
rarely happens too these days. He helped me eat my toast as I checked
out the Internet. Little of note had happened overnight.
I set off to work. The
journey was slow; very slow. There were several places that the chap
driving the lorry of http://www.crucial-trading.com could have pulled
over to stop, but he didn't. He drove all the way from Ashford to
Chartahm (about ten miles of "A" road) at
twenty-five miles per hour with a huge queue of traffic behind him.
Advertising on your
lorries can be a double-deged sword; I for one shan't be using
http://www.crucial-trading.com for whatever it is that they trade
crucially.
As I drove I listened to
the radio. I had a wry smile when the Circle group announced that
they are pulling out of their involvement with Hitchingbrook
Hospital in Cambridge.
They'd taken on running
the NHS hospital as a private concern but it would seem that the
unsustainable cost of “unprecedented A&E attendances”
made their business model unviable. Or, in layman's terms, there was
no money to be made from it.
There are those who claim
hospitals are under-funded, and are using this to back their
position. I'm not sure that hospitals are underfunded. The problem is
that they have limited resources to provide unlimited services.
Anyone can turn up at the A&E department as many times as they
like and expect to been seen by medical professionals. Who needs an
appointment with a G.P. when you can see a doctor at the hospital
whenever you like? And bearing that in mind how do you budget for
such?
One of the people being
interviewed on the radio about the matter was a leading light in
accident and emergency medicine. He recounted the tale of the A&E
department where he works where a certain patient has attended
(because he apparently has nothing better to do) twenty times
in the last month.
This sort of thing
doesn't happen in private health care. Private health care knows what
it's going to get. People go private for a specific one-off operation
or consultation in order to jump the NHS queues. Then they go back to
the NHS for all their ongoing and never-ending general maladies.
I stopped off on my way
to work to check on a geocache I'd hidden a couple of years ago. I'd
not had anything reported on it for some time and was wondering if it
had disappeared. I hoped not; it was a rather expensive puzzle box.
It hadn't exactly disappeared; but it was ten yards away from where
it was supposed to be.
Why can't people put
these things back where they find them?
And so to work where I
did my bit on a rather busy day. At lunch time I saxed. "Blue
Moon" has promise, but the Bach minuet needs a little work.
Mind you Johann Sebastian did write his minuet over a hundred years
before Adolphe built the first saxophone, so that is my lame excuse
and I am sticking to it.
Once home I took "Furry
Face TM" for a walk round the block. For
all that it is now four days since Twelfth Night there were still a
few houses with Christmas trees up. And with my dog walked I set
about ironig a few (six) shirts. It's surprising how long it
takes to iron a shirt or six...
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