Entries Tagged as 'Health politics'

The GMC and value for money

OK, this will probably only be of any appeal to other registered medical practitioners like me who pay £290 a year (£390 from next month) for the privilege of being abused, spat at and vomited on, but have you seen what the GMC (General Medical Council) have just decided to spend some of that money on?

A lucky web designer has just been paid a small fortune to produce an interactive video web tutorial to teach doctors how not to be complete idiots. You can see it here. It’s very pretty and very well done, but as to the content…

In fact that’s the problem with a lot of the GMC’s guidelines. I guess they have to be actually written down somewhere, but if a doctor really needs to be told that it’s best to be polite where possible, honest, not to kill patients or to have sex with them (with or without their informed consent), then that person is probably already heading down the wrong career path.

NHS IT - you think?

12 BILLION pounds they’ve spent. Of your money. And to show for it? Well, we can now get xray images electronically, which is nice. But also means that instead of losing the odd xray like we used to, now when the server goes down (which it does about once a fortnight - despite promises made that it never would) we can lose all the xrays at once. That’s progress. [Read more →]

Free parking when visiting sick relatives; but only if you live in Wales

The Welsh Assembly have just announced that hospital parking in Wales is to be free. Where I work, and in just about every other hospital in England and Scotland, you have to pay money to the hospital if you want to visit a loved one, or even if you need to attend the hospital as a patient. [Read more →]