#nhs (10 links)
- New Statesman | How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS newstatesman.com
<blockquote>Chapanis had recognised that human beings’ propensity to make mistakes when they are tired is much harder to fix than the design of levers. His deeper insight was that people have limits, and many of their mistakes are predictable effects of those limits. That is why the architects of CRM defined its aim as the reduction of human error, rather than pilot error. Rather than trying to hire or train perfect pilots, it is better to design systems that minimise or mitigate inevitable human mistakes.</blockquote>
- Dear Google, am I pregnant? - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
<blockquote>The system PA uploaded your personal hospital records to is said to be Google BigQuery. It supports one-click database sharing with any other Google account, and is hosted on servers outside the UK (and possibly outside the EU, in breach of the EU Data Protection Directive). And what they uploaded was the entire shooting match—full personal medical records indexed by NHS patient number—with enough additional data (post code, address, date of birth, gender) to make de-anonymizing the records trivial.</blockquote>
- Care.data is in chaos. It breaks my heart - Ben Goldacre theguardian.com
<blockquote>There are people in my profession who think they can ignore this problem. Some are murmuring that this mess is like MMR, a public misunderstanding to be corrected with better PR. They are wrong: it's like nuclear power. Medical data, rarefied and condensed, presents huge power to do good, but it also presents huge risks. When leaked, it cannot be unleaked; when lost, public trust will take decades to regain.</blockquote>
It gets worse.
<blockquote>It's painful for me to write critically about a project like care.data, because I love medical data, and I know the good it can do. We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS. Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.
So here's my advice: if you're thinking of opting out – wait. If you run care.data – listen. </blockquote>
So frustrating.
- A simple guide to Care.data wired.co.uk
- Scotland is going it alone – regardless of the referendum theguardian.com
<blockquote>The more influential ministers in the coalition ache above all to radically challenge the role of the state, to achieve the reverse of the 1945 Labour government. Remarkably, given that they rule in a hung parliament, they have found the space to pursue their radical ambitions. Few in England voted for a revolutionary overhaul of the NHS, the near privatisation of universities, a further decline in the power of local government, a framework for education that paves the way for a return to selection and the introduction of profit-making schools, but that is what they are getting. In their fervent disdain for the state as a mediating agency, ministers focus with special energetic intensity on areas over which they happen to have no powers in Scotland.
As a result Scotland becomes more markedly different than ever. In Scotland the NHS is spared the haphazard revolution in England. The education secretary, Michael Gove, is powerless to impose his resolute will on schools in Scotland and the same applies to his other more evangelical colleagues moving England rightwards. Without doing very much Scotland becomes more different because of what is happening in England. The limited powers handed over to the Scottish parliament are precisely the ones that partly protect it from the ideological mission of the Westminster government. </blockquote>
- The Tory nightmare: don't say you weren't warned | Ian Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
"The reason this government's moving so quickly to divide the NHS into privatised contractual fiefdoms for its mates, and to divert education budgets into "free" schools for its mates' children, is because it can. Resistance has been atomised. Working-class rage, once articulated by powerful unions representing people doing proper jobs, has dissipated." Developers: unionise!
- My dying friend found kindness to be the rule, not the exception | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer guardian.co.uk
The health service is portrayed as an intractable managerial nightmare. We spend so much time deploring the waste and inefficiency that we often forget that at the heart of the whole unwieldy system is a routine compassion, which is simply magnificent. And even more remarkable is that we attempt to guarantee this consideration to every person in the country who needs care.