Striking doctors are being warned that the NHS will start formally collecting evidence of the harm to patients caused by their refusal to help struggling hospitals. The Telegraph has more.
Under strike protocols, hospital trusts can ask unions to allow doctors to cross picket lines and cover shifts if patient safety is compromised.
But all known requests relating to the current action have so far been rejected by the British Medical Association (BMA).
On Thursday, senior officials at NHS England wrote to the BMA – setting out steps to strengthen safety protocols and log evidence of all harm occurring when such requests are rejected.
It came as hospitals across the country came under strain, with critical incidents and black alerts declared in almost every part of the country, and A&E units repeating warnings that they could only handle “life threatening” cases.
Several hospitals issued public statements urging the public to take relatives home as soon as safely possible, in order to free up beds.
The letter is signed by Emily Lawson, the interim NHS Chief Operating Officer, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the National Medical Director and Navina Evans, the Chief Workforce Officer.
In the letter, Prof Powis said health officials will now follow up every case where mitigations have been rejected, in order to compile a picture of the impact on services.
Hospitals have been told to specifically record all safety incidents during strikes “so that we can evidence harm and near misses which might have been avoided”.
Worth reading in full.
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Not uninteresting, to use a nice double-negative. But I think there’s an error in the first proposition of trans-logic. Their claim is not that sex and gender are identical but that sex doesn’t exist, only gender in the form of gender roles people chose to play because they feel innately represented by them at the moment. This implies that humans have an essence which is different from and more important than the realities of their bodily existence. That’s a traditional, Christian concept they’d like to keep while doing away with God.
This intellectual frippery misses the point that in modern personality theory the concept of mental disorder no longer exists. If we could just restore for a moment the concept of dissociated identity we would get much further in explaining ‘trans’ than we do with highbrow games about logic structures.
There is mention in this article of ‘Nature’ and I think this is a crucial aspect. I work in wildlife and conservation and would say that we can learn a lot on this issue by looking at the natural world. A female Sparrowhawk is 25% bigger than a male Sparrowhawk, there is a similar size difference with many of the raptors. A male sparrowhawk may wish to go ‘trans’ but in no way can it bridge that 25% size difference.
It may not look that way to some but biologically, the difference between male and female humans is every bit as unbridgeable as the difference between male and female Sparrowhawks!
This article does not mention mothers and fathers but to my mind this is crucial to this whole issue. In the natural world reproduction is a major top priority, new birth is essential to the continuation of the species, there is not time or place for any trans rights stuff; nature needs babies, you are either an active mother or an active father or you are a waste of space. The weird thing is that when the ‘trans’ stuff gets taken to extremes you get people taking hormones and going in for surgery that effectively renders them eunuchs and to the natural world more or less irrelevant.
The article talks about a man doing as a woman does or a woman doing as a man does but if you consider that what a woman does is become a mother or if what a man does is become a father then these are not interchangeable. A man can wear a dress and have a fine hair-do but he cannot give birth, a woman can wear a boiler suit and work boots but she can never father a child.
I was about to suggest the following practical definition of man and woman: Let two people have sex with each other until one of them gets pregnant. That’s then the woman and the other is the man.
I would appreciate an explanation governing that warped logic.
I’ll have a try
I’m none the wiser.
If you want to start talking about biology why not go right down to the cellular/genetic level? Although our bodies are made up of lots of different types of cells they all (with a very small number of exceptions such as red blood cells) contain the full set of genes, arranged on chromosones, that make us who we are. If you were born (or strictly speaking conceived) with 2 X chromosones you will have these in every cell in your body and have been born with a womb, vagina etc. i.e. you’re female. If you you have an X and a Y chromosone, these will be present in every cell in your body and you’ll have been born with a penis, testicles etc. i.e. you’re a man.
Therefore it follows that the differences between men and women are present in every cell, although it’s true that not all genes are active in any given type of cell. Since no one can change their DNA/cellular makeup it follows that no amount of surgery, hormones, puberty blockers etc. can change a man into a woman or a woman into a man.
Simple genetics tells us that our sex was fixed at the moment of conception and cannot be changed, and maybe this simple truth should be explained more often by people who are sceptical of the trans agenda.
‘Trans’-ness should be considered as the development (possibly early in development) of gender self-identity in the brain that are inconsistent with the biological sex.
IMO it is reasonable to be sympathetic towards people who are affected by this — they’re unleashed into a world in which their gender identity doesn’t fit. This doesn’t mean something simple like ‘they are male and want to wear a dress’, but instead would permeate all aspects of gender-social interaction (friendships, relationships, etc).
The big question of today is whether such an individual would be best served by saying that they should simply ‘wear the dress’ (etc etc) or whether it would be better to use psychotherapy to explore whether the individual could be suitably supported in their birth gender.
I know this sounds much like ‘gay conversion’, but it isn’t — homosexual individuals are simply attracted to people of the same sex, and having a society that accepts their preference can make those individuals as ‘happy’ as heterosexual individuals — this could be considered a ‘good result’ for society. Transgender individuals, however, often have a battle to reconcile their internal gender identity with the body that medicine can offer them — often this imbalance leads to depression and, far too often, suicide. This risk means that psychotherapy could well be the least-worst option for the gender dysphoric.
This is bovine manure. Either we believe in God. Then, we have a body/ soul dichotomy and we know what Christian religion (something entirely different from the organized [state] church) says about this topic. Or we don’t. Then, consciousness is a biological function of the body, ie a part of it and not something that’s distinct from it. And then, this whole wrong body concept just evaporates into nothing. Insofar we’re supposed to accept transwhatever as ersatz-religion of the people who’d really like to have one, just more focussed on what really interests them, namely, sex! sex! sex! sex!, and less on cumbersome morals, that’s fine as well. But it should be clearly stated on the tin: This is a creed and we are proselytizing to spread it.