There have been long queues outside vaccine clinics in the Republic of Ireland this weekend, with parents waiting in the rain to take advantage of the extension of the country’s vaccine roll-out by getting their children ‘jabbed’. Sky News has the story.
While the youngsters could get a shot from Friday, the roll-out began in earnest on Saturday with long queues seen outside vaccination centres.
The Republic of Ireland joins the likes of the United States, Israel, France and a number of other nations who are inoculating young people against Covid.
The U.K. has taken a different approach, with vaccinations only offered to 12 to 15 year-olds with certain medical conditions, or to those who live with vulnerable family members.
In Ireland, about 75,000 in the age range had registered for an appointment by Saturday, with bookings having been open for 48 hours.
Parental consent is needed, with the Pfizer or Moderna jab on offer.
Bill and Sarah Shelley, aged 14 and 12, were taken by their father Michael to get a vaccine in Dublin.
The family queued in the rain to get their shots.
Michael said: “We’re very pleased, I’m delighted they’ve got their first vaccine. …
More than 80% of adults in the Republic of Ireland are fully inoculated, and some 90% have had at least one dose of a vaccine.
The Health Service Executive wants to vaccinate those in the 12-15 range “rapidly and quickly”, and that the decision marked a “very strong point” on the country’s fight against COVID.
Another 2,074 coronavirus cases were reported in the country on Saturday.
There were 229 people with COVID in hospital, 43 of whom were in intensive care.
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I’m sure many factors are at work but it seems like the lockdowns, furlough etc. have engendered a general slackness and lack of effort and urgency in many people.
It’s a bloated bureaucratic monstrosity which is grossly inefficient and a huge waste of taxpayers money, which will simply help to drive us into deeper economic recession. That is why it will be kept as is.
All government departments will happily spend all the money they’ve been granted plus a little bit more, and then ask for more money. No government department will ever say that they can manage fine with less money (except in rare cases where a renegade has been put in charge — they’ll then be fired).
The purpose of central government is to keep this process in check.
The NHS seems to have managed to get itself into a position where the usual control systems have broken and it is now out of control. I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done to fix this.
But it’s “the envy of the world” don’t you know? Ho bloody ho ho
.. noted that there are also 13% more doctors – including 10% more consultants – as well as 11% more nurses and 10% more clinical staff in the NHS now compared to 2019
Is that actually credible? Where have they all appeared from? Retrained during lockdown from being chefs, bar staff, waiting staff …? I don’t think so.
One of the plainest, clearest lessons of the last three years is to question everything we’re told, especially when it involves figures.
These extra medics are the cohort of retired medics who had their registration automatically extended to swell the workforce. So yes, there are more medics registered but as they’re not employed the workforce is shrinking.
You’re correct, it’s all lies.
This ^^^^ I also read about this; the number of doctors and even nurses has been artificially inflated by re-activating masses of retired doctors, in order to support govt claims that they have increased the numbers.
Good point, and may well be a large part of the explanation. Certainly a question worth asking.
A better set of figures would be total hours worked for doctors, consultants, nurses and so on. My guess is that a fair few of the permanent staff have since lockdowns gone on to part-time hours – so for the same numbers of total staff, fewer hours total worked.
Baseline assumption: everything is just a f*****g lie.
58% of UK doctors work three days per week or less.
Thing is, haven’t working conditions brought this about?
They are well paid, and many won’t need to work full time to make ends meet. And if the job is arduous, with long hours, isn’t there a massive incentive to go part time?
Exactly. I know a helluva lot of people who work in the NHS. I can’t think of one who works full-time.
The effect and problem of women now dominating med school enrollment.
Indeed. A recently retired GP who I work with occasionally has admitted exactly that.
That’s the WTE or whole time equivalent which in my field hasn’t changed just more part timers working as the emotional pressure on top of the beaurocratic pile of shite & actual clinical part of the job is just too much to take full time.
That’s true, however, both doctor & nurse numbers are up since 2010 while hospital beds are down.
It’s also important to look at the number of Whole Time Equivalent doctors there are. If this number has increased, then great, if this number has reduced or stayed the same then it’s just more individual doctors registered with no real world impact on the actual work.
That does beg for an explanation (if true …). If the additional care isn’t happening in the hospitals well it certainly isn’t happening in the community.
So where have the xtras gone? Part time? (see above.)
Extra money is being diverted in to the NHS. I am at the point where I no longer believe this is entirely true. Nominally money is allegedly going into NHS accounts but how it is spent is another matter.
We may well have a home grown version of the Ukrainian situation – millions of dollars leaving the United States and then miraculously appearing back in Democrats accounts. It’s not as if there is evidence of Ukraine actually spending the money they allegedly receive is it?
So, money to the NHS is actually a diversionary tactic which allows taxpayer’s money to be stolen and siphoned away to the elites. No wonder the bill for “administrators” is growing as fast as the national debt, somebody has to keep this under wraps.
Now that’s what I call a conspiracy theory!
It’s beyond repair, a money sucking black hole.
It needs the Musk/Icahn treatment. ASAP.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S6sfj1LpK2g
My 85 year-old Dad was put on a waiting list six months ago for retina surgery. Our local hospital had blocked all eye operations for a couple of years. You couldn’t even go privately. In the last six months his eye became far worse. He had the op two weeks ago and was told it was very bad because of the delay. He saw the specialist – who is one of the best in the country – today and has been told the operation has failed and he’s now blind in that eye.
And we have feature writers in the Daily Mail saying they fancy Matt Hancock…
My sister in law was seconded to the NHS legal department as an advisor around 2019. She described not being allowed to print a pdf document from her laptop. It would need printed in an NHS department designated specifically to print pdf documents. The process would be predictably painful, and she would have a lot of documents to print.
She’s also described how any action had to be run through a very specific and inflexible chain of command, with everyone in that chain sticking strictly to the boundaries of their role. This meant that if anyone was off sick (as tended to happen a lot), the whole process would be paralysed, and nothing would get done.
A friend worked as a senior (band 6) researcher. She would describe the substantial sums her department were given to needlessly duplicate data gathering already carried out by academia and charities. The processes she described by which her department would gather data / volunteers for studies sounded amateurish at best, and guaranteed to lead to poor datasets, feeding garbage into important research. She would describe how at events promoting awareness of issues and touting for volunteers, she would see band 9 (the most senior) staff coming down from their office to help hand out leaflets. She wondered why they wouldn’t have more important things to do. She would describe a small minority of un-fireable senior incumbents in her department as being lazy, vindictive and territorial, and as a result, a disproportionate drain on morale and resources.
My sister was a nurse practitioner in the NHS, and when a job for which she was in competition with a colleague came up, the colleague launched a smear campaign against her involving a series of fabricated complaints. One was that she had failed to prescribe the colleague (as a ‘patient’) drugs that were not actually available in the practice. Another was failure to properly examine a patient on the grounds of not using a suitable couch, and failing to x-ray them.
She had needed to send the patient to a nearby hospital for an x-ray as her clinic did not have a working machine, and she could not use a couch because her practice didn’t have one. She had officially complained about the lack of both for some time.
Hence her response to the complaints would involve exposing the failures of her practice’s management. Can you imagine where this would lead?
They circled the wagons, fired her, and subjected her to a two year inquiry, the results of which would determine her ability to ever work again. One of many highlights was being forced to sit in a soviet style show-trial in front of a panel of managers, who afterwards falsified a report of what was discussed (she wisely managed to get an audio recording of it). She took a job in the private sector, but NHS management pursued her out of sheer spite and informed her employers she was ‘under investigation’. They had to let her go. They attempted to intimidate her with specific instructions to show contrition and take responsibility for the vague and nebulous charges made against her, and it was implied that if she failed to do this her career would be finished. It was only on my insistence that she refused and fought them.
She took the case to the NMC, and they cleared her of all the allegations, with no small degree of fire for her persecutors. The folder containing documentation for the complaint was as thick a couple of encyclopaedia volumes. In terms of just conducting the failed campaign against her, the whole thing must have cost the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds – far more than the cost of a couch, or a good Nurse Practitioner.
Apparently not finished with her, my sister suffered a stroke last year after several months of working on Covid wards, and a few weeks after receiving the AZ vaccine, suffering pain and tingling limbs from the moment she was vaccinated. The emergency department she was admitted to diagnosed her with a stroke, then the hospital left her untreated for four days, with consultants ascribing her symptoms to other causes. Prior to the stroke she had requested for her symptoms to be entered into the Yellow Card system, which her GP refused.
Through these and other interactions, I’ve built up a picture of the NHS as being not one, but several different entities, each with their own purpose, most being well meaning and to some degree effective. The largest and most well funded of these however, while not necessarily mendacious, is a bureaucratic, organically formed and politically driven monster, dedicated to self preservation and territorial expansion through atomisation of responsibility and management mission-creep. This vast drain on resources creates further crises in management and competence on the already stretched ‘front line’, which leads to more work and expense, which for the monster is just grist to the mill.
How anyone could even begin to tackle or reform such a system is anyone’s guess.
Good grief. Your poor sister in law.
You might mean my sister.. Thankfully she’s made a pretty good (though not full) recovery from her stroke.
I apologise.
No need at all, but thank you 🙂
So sorry to hear about your sister and her resulting ill health, but pleased to hear that she has some recovery.
Your picture of the petty, vicious, vindictive bullying and incompetence is a true reflection of the NHS, the self styled “envy of the world”. My wife suffered a similar approach but cut her losses and got out before it impacted her health.
I hope your sister’s health continues to improve.
Thank you, I know she’d appreciate that. The picture is unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. I’m glad your wife had the determination to move on when it was causing damage – it can’t be an easy thing to do when you’ve invested so much time and energy into a career.
In recent years the NHS as a bureaucracy has developed a really unhealthy relationship with the public through political activism and PR, which along the same lines of other areas of ideological activism, looks a lot like Munchausen’s by proxy.
The NHS desperately needs an enema. It is the epitome of bureaucratic sloth and waste, tied up with non-jobs and functions that add nothing to patient care, but which soak up the cash and add layer upon layer of un-necessary regulation and activity on the people trying to do the job.
The only solution is to break it up, reduce its scope to urgent care, (Its a health service, not a ‘wellness’ service), and allow people to build their own insurance around it. More than anything it needs to stop being free at the point of care. People will always take the piss out of something that is ‘free’.
Your points are well made. Something which is ‘free’ has no value to people.
A big part of the explanation is that since 2020/21 hospitals are no long funded per item of activity but via a block contract with activity targets. Consequently, they don’t lose income if they provide less treatment. The incentives to be productive have gone and staff have got used to doing less work.
Another important factor is that sickness absence rates have doubled due largely to mass testing for Covid and ten days of isolation for those testing positive.
A further important factor is increased bed occupancy due to the loss of capacity in the care home sector following the vaccine mandate. This results in a lot of inpatient elective surgery being cancelled due to lack of beds.
A slightly different take on this would be to question how many routine surgical procedures are actually necessary?
At least in Australia, multiple spinal fusions for back pain and arthroscopies for knee arthritis are still performed, despite no evidence that they actually help.
We could add to that a number of knee replacements, which are often less effective than weight loss and exercise (which is largely how I treat knee arthritis).
Anecdotally, I see many patients who are actually worse after having these procedures.
From April 2020 hospitals were moved to a block funding arrangement where they got paid the same regardless of activity. Previously their income was linked directly to the amount of treatments they provided. The incentive to productivity has been removed and staff have got used to doing less work.
it is also notable that sickness absence rates are around twice what they were before2020 due to the ongoing Covid testing and isolation procedures. Also, there are fewer beds available for elective surgery because of the care home crisis which means much greater delays in discharging patients from hospital.
A further factor is that senior medical staff are seldom willing to work overtime now to undertake additional sessions at weekends. The pension taxation regime penalises overtime and they can earn more in the private sector doing work NHS hospitals used to do.
Having got away with doing nothing (excluding Tik Tok videos) in the scamdemic the NHS has realised nobody can tell them what to do. So now they’re taking the P155 big time so more money is hosed over the organisation to fund extra 000’s of Diversity Leads, Directors, Project Coordinators etc etc
I imagine a lot of it is having the will to do it – my consultant atSheffield’s RHH removed a couple of tumours from my brain on Saturday and a while there a lot of staff in the hospital, albeit fewr than I’d usually see, they were there, bless, ’em. Unlike Sheffied’s taxi drivers which were like hen’s teeth.