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Stephen Hawking Is Taking Legal Action Against Jeremy Hunt

Mullardman said:
Sorry to hear this FM. If it's any comfort, as I understand it from a layman's P.O.V., both bone and prostate cancer are pretty slow to progress. In the case of the latter, it is often controlled with drugs. However, nobody should be denied pain relief.
The two month wait seems to be target for some cancers, but It looks like it would all hinge on whther the case was seen as urgent or non urgent.

Lots here: https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/appointment-booking/Pages/nhs-waiting-times.aspx

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statisti...ncer-Waiting-Times-Annual-Report-201617-1.pdf

http://www.christie.nhs.uk/about-us/our-standards/cancer-waiting-times/

Lots more online.
Mull
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Thanks Mull.


They gave him morphine but according to him It doesn't touch It. They've now given him something else but I don't know If It's worked or not.
 
Suffolk Tony said:
Mull, you clearly don't believe that any companies who happen to specialise in Healthcare provision should make a profit when operating NHS contracts. That's your view, but then you remove the incentive to innovate, or the means to reward your staff for efficiency. The NHS buys these companies' expertise and expects ongoing improvements and cost saving. They need to be incentivised to provide these things; without incentive, things just stagnate. In an ideal world, the NHS would be a harmonious whole, all parts working together for the love of it, but that's not going to happen. We all need and expect to be rewarded for our efforts, it's a fact of life.
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I completely understand your argument Tony. I just don't accept it, or at least I don't accept that privatisation is the answer to everything. Of course private companies need to make profits, but you underpin your support for 'private' with the usual assumptions. 1. That 'public' services are automatically inefficient and stagnatory. 2. Private companies are automatically efficent and innovative. Neither argument is supported by the evidence. It's a purely political judgement. As I said above.. I can see no real benefit to the population at large, or to the economy, after years of this arrant, politically driven nonsense.

I've outlined above what happened in my own field. The collective expertise and long term incremental development of the acknowledged best system of Career Guidance on the planet, was reduced to a system of box ticking and patchy 'entitlement', based on a total 'Mick P style' misunderstanding of the role and function of Career Guidance within the wider system of education, training and employment. What remains is next to useless and contributes next to nothing to the effective running of the system, yet Govt. gets to claim cost savings ( a tiny fraction of 1% of the entire education/training/employment services budget) and to propagate the lie that everything is OK. It's all about ships and 'ha'porths' of tar'. In addition, I see no innovation. All of the usual assumptions about 'careers' held by the ignorant, are now played out. It's all been reduced to A4E type coercion to drive unfortunates into any old minimum wage job. It's sickening to witness. The innovation and initiatives which came from a dedicated cohort of qualified Professionals, simply because they were a dedicated cohort of qualified Professionals, have now ended.

I see similar processes in health, education, social services, police, fire, ambulance and all the other Public Service fields where a long tradition of expertise and dedication has been crushed in the name of 'efficiency' and where minimal savings have resulted in massive damage to the delivery of services and the outcomes for service users. The 'Homeless' thread elsewhere here points to the cumulative damage done to one aspect of British society by this bloody minded 'CUT CUT CUT' mentality.

There is no plan. There is no vision. There is nothing but short term, fragmented, blinkered thinking based around false notions of 'efficiency' and 'cost effectiveness'. It's like some sort of disease.

Eventually the country will wake up from this sleep walk into the third world, but I'm not holding my breath.
 
Mull, I sympathise with what has happened in your job, but that's not the NHS. I certainly didn't state that privatisation is the answer to everything, it's just one approach that can be valuable if properly implemented. There are many examples of excellent services within the NHS, some of which were originally tendered out to specialised private companies who sorted out badly-run and managed provision. The problem faced by these in-house services is that, given the squeeze on funding, they tend to get their budgets plundered by other larger and more crucial departments. I could give you lots of examples of this happening.

We'll never agree about the value of incentivising staff and companies with financial rewards. It does work...
 
fatmarley said:
Thanks Mull.


They gave him morphine but according to him It doesn't touch It. They've now given him something else but I don't know If It's worked or not.
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Further, the mental pain of an enforced long wait with cancer hanging over you must in itself be drastic.
 
Suffolk Tony said:
Mull, I sympathise with what has happened in your job, but that's not the NHS. I certainly didn't state that privatisation is the answer to everything, it's just one approach that can be valuable if properly implemented. There are many examples of excellent services within the NHS, some of which were originally tendered out to specialised private companies who sorted out badly-run and managed provision. The problem faced by these in-house services is that, given the squeeze on funding, they tend to get their budgets plundered by other larger and more crucial departments. I could give you lots of examples of this happening.

We'll never agree about the value of incentivising staff and companies with financial rewards. It does work...
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Well of course you can incentivise people with cash. The real question is why should you need to? This route always risks seeing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. I'd argue that if people are in a job which they have had to work and study to gain access to, then they are most likely already incentivised to do a good job, by their professional ethos. Clearly, they will want to be paid.. but that should not be the main driver of their concept of standards or efficiency. It is this 'importation' from the Private Sector, of Taylorist attitudes to work and workers which has resulted in the distrust of professionals (and experts) and led to the wholesale demoralisation of public servants in the face of very inexpert and politically motivated interference.

Mull
 
Suffolk Tony said:
We'll never agree about the value of incentivising staff and companies with financial rewards. It does work...
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your statement is folk wisdom. research shows that it can have the exactly opposite effect. this is before we even begin to consider the economic and democratic ramfications. finally, when we get to a point in society where using words like "incentivise" is normal, then there is really no point in living any more.
 
vuk said:
your statement is folk wisdom. research shows that it can have the exactly opposite effect. this is before we even begin to consider the economic and democratic ramfications. finally, when we get to a point in society where using words like "incentivise" is normal, then there is really no point in living any more.
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No, it's the experience of starting and running a fairly large company employing professional clinicians. We all need incentivising in one way or another, it's the way of the world, don't try and argue against this. Recognising what type of incentive gets the best out if people is an important aspect of good management.
 
Suffolk Tony said:
No, it's the experience of starting and running a fairly large company employing professional clinicians. We all need incentivising in one way or another, it's the way of the world, don't try and argue against this. Recognising what type of incentive gets the best out if people is an important aspect of good management.
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that is anecdote, not research. anyhow, i am sorry to have even started this and provoked yet more management-speak.
 
vuk said:
that is anecdote, not research. anyhow, i am sorry to have even started this and provoked even more management-speak.
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No, it's experience, not anecdote. I'm not big on management-speak, what is it you don't understand?
 
Suffolk Tony said:
No, it's experience, not anecdote. I'm not big on management-speak, what is it you don't understand?
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personal experience is called anecdotal evidence in science. i understand what you are saying, but you are using management jargon like "incentivise" and speaking of human motivation/behaviour like an MBA who has no proper education in fields that study it corectly.
 
vuk said:
personal experience is called anecdotal evidence in science. i understand what you are saying, but you are using management jargon like "incentivise" and speaking of human motivation/behaviour like an MBA who has no proper education in fields that study it corectly.
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Incentivise is a perfectly clear and understandable word and not “management jargon”, that's nonsense. You know nothing about me, or what training and experience I've had. I suggest you do me the courtesy if acknowledging I probably know more about this subject than you do.
 
My favourite jargony word is manipulize used thusly (or all thus-like): You gotsa manipulize it.

I heard a locksmith say that in Kentucky when a coworker was locked out of her car and he was trying to pick the lock: "I almost have it. You gosta manipulize it."

Joe
 
Suffolk Tony said:
Incentivise is a perfectly clear and understandable word and not “management jargon”, that's nonsense. You know nothing about me, or what training and experience I've had. I suggest you do me the courtesy if acknowledging I probably know more about this subject than you do.
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not sure which "subject" you have in mind, but you are saying invalid things about human behaviour and motivation as tested in social/experimental psychology. you also clearly do (or did) not understand what anecdotal evidence is and still don't appear to grasp why it isn't worth very much. i will acknowledge that you probably know how to play management word games in a particular environment in which your strategy can benefit you. you are most certainly better at that than i am.
 
vuk said:
not sure which "subject" you have in mind, but you are saying invalid things about human behaviour and motivation as tested in social/experimental psychology. you also clearly do (or did) not understand what anecdotal evidence is and still don't appear to grasp why it isn't worth very much. i will acknowledge that you probably know how to play management word games in a particular environment in which your strategy can benefit you. you are most certainly better at that than i am.
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Oh dear. You do seem to struggle with grasping simple english. I ask again, what terms I've used that you happen to regard as management speak? You want to lecture me on psychology, but you've no clue about me, and it's clear you've no experience of managing people.
 
Suffolk Tony said:
Oh dear. You do seem to struggle with grasping simple english.
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perhaps. english is not my first language.

i think i do understand enough to spot your inability to grasp simple behavioural science. i even gave you a cartoon version.
 
Let's cut to the chase here: a simple test. You discover you're using too much plastic A, so you talk to your staff - 1. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company” or 2. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company, and we'll give you 50% of the money saved”. So what do you think will work best? Simple behavioural science...
 
Suffolk Tony said:
Let's cut to the chase here: a simple test. You discover you're using too much plastic A, so you talk to your staff - 1. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company” or 2. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company, and we'll give you 50% of the money saved”. So what do you think will work best? Simple behavioural science...
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yes, you could test something like that, but you would have to break it down to (analyze by) specific tasks and have better/narrower scopes of your conditions, especially the non-financial one . your proposed "test" is actually not simple at all, but it can be split apart to a set of simple, testable principles, even within one experiment, if we had to.

that said, if you take condition B, the research that as already been carried out suggests that people carrying out the most menial work (physical labour) would perform best (in the direction you want) with financial incentive, but the rest would be hindered by it.

as for the vague "it will help the company" condition A, i'm not sure of the concept you are getting at -- identification with company, belief in company doing well equals job security, etc. -- too messy to be of scientific interest.
 
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