What can you see

I have just had my second cataract operation!  Many thanks to the NHS free and smoothly done BUT I am now long-sighted.

After spending 60 years of my life as a short-sighted geek type person I now have long vision,  It changed your life and takes some getting used to. Until now the first thing I did when I woke up was to put my glasses on, this was essential to wandering round the house and finding things, so my glasses were sort of permanently attached.

 Now I don't need them for doing daily things BUT I do need them to read, this makes life very confusing, go into the kitchen but can't read the recipe but can find the right pot and turn on the oven! I now no the confusion of those who having had good eyesight all their lives suddenly find they can't read, it al very disorienting.

The other thing I now do is to be sitting there reading and get up, forgetting to take off my reading glasses, now the whole world looks odd and makes you feel sick.

I suppose I will have to get varifocal type glasses again but cannot do that till I have been discharged from the hospital. But I have made that appointment for a day I am in London so now I have to try to change it!

David Prior elevation of incompence

  I was quietly listening to PM on Radio 4 and was horrified to hear that David Prior, failed Tory politician, is now the head of the Quality Care Commission. He has been chair of the board of two hospitals, one of which was, if I remember correctly, closed down and the other was Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. This latter hospital has recently been crticised for having having ambulances waiting for far too long at A &E. This was during Mt Prior's reign.

  He was a part=term chair of the Board and during his time the hospital become a trust. The next two events were quite interesting, they got rid of the chief executive for an undisclosed sum and a gagging clause and they doubled his salary.

  My feeling was that he knew nothing about running a hospital and had collected a board who were not a lot better than him. There were only two members of the board who had any medical experience and when I asked Mr Prior any technical question he had no idea what I was talking about. He was good at one things, wandering around the hospital behaving like a lord of the manor, he knew people fisrt name so seemed like he cared.

  The idea that he would be able to lead the Care Quality Commission is a joke, he has no understanding of either medicine or statistics, the two key skills needed to make a serious analysis of a hospitals performance. He is a master of lining his own pocket and never getting any blame.

Blaming other people

 Hop=w often can the Tories get away with blaming the last government for the financial crisis. It was their friends in the city, the city slickers, who fund the Tories and they are still their loyal servants and I mean servants.

  The Tories in government are being for not being tough enough on Brussels for the proposed restriction on bonuses, But the bonus culture has played a large part in causing the problems. One you get a bonus it is yours, how you got it does not seem to matter.

  This can be seen with the PIP scandal, those working in the branches were under great pressure to sell PIP, the branch got bonuses for selling them who cared  whether they should have paid them or not, just get the money in. Would the LIBOR scandal have happened if there were no bonuses to be won. Unless something is criminal those who got their bonuses walked away with their pockets stuffed with gold.

  The the City Slickers and their lackeys in the Tory party go on about wealth creators. When was the last time anyone in the City created wealth rather than got some to stick on their fingers as it went past. Those in the City are more akin to pickpockets than wealth creators. The British, especially the upper classes have never known how to create wealth how to steal it. That is what the Normans did and it still goes on, why work to make things when you can just pocket some as it goes passed.

  It is time the people woke up to the con trick and controlled these people and if they all want to leave the country, we should wave them goodbye. Notice that even Switzerland has had enough they had to bail out UBS and do not see why these bankers should walk away with taxpayers money"

Adversarial

  Listening to the radio this morning they had two people talking about Hugo Chavez whose death has just been announced. Do we have an interesting discussion about his role what he achieved and what he did wrong. Of course not we had two people, both blokes of course, one saying he was good and one saying he was evil. I am sure the reality is much more complex than that, why does the BBC, probably reflecting our society have to create an advesarial situation rather than trying to have a rational discussion.

 Similarly, Andy Burnham could not just welcome the change about competition in the NHS but has to call it a "humiliating climb down". If we want to encourage politicians, managers etc to get things right we should applaud them for changing their mind when they are wrong. Not create this adversarial competition. Surely one of the most dangerous activities is to make a mistake and then compound it by not realising and correcting it. In some situations this is not possible, playing a shot at tennis has to be done very quickly and you can't correct it but very few decisions in normal life are like that, driving being an exception.

 A more depressing example is our legal system, on Saturday there was a long article about the death of a baby caused by a failure to realise how  serious the situation was.The parents did not want to delay the inquest as this they find it painful. The private health care company responsible employed lawyers and "expert" witnesses to make sure that the coroner could not blame them. They did not want to go down that route. So no counter "expert" witnesses were called. The Coroner can only rule on what is said. So there is no attempt to find the truth or understand what is happening. This again is our adversarial system, two lawyers lying at each other and so called expert witnesses lying for money.

  I always think that one should use the term "expert" in quotation marks when they are being paid by one side of the case since they will hardly get paid for telling the truth if it is against the person or company paying them. Oddly the BBC did it again on a programme "Bang goes..". They were discussing plastics and whether plastic wrapping si dangerous. The so-called expert was employed by the plastic wrapping industry, he might be a very good chemist but he is hardly likely to say these plastic wrappings are bad for you.

  Can we change the way we do things so that a more reasonable approach to investigating failures in our society can try to reach some sort of truth.