Off to the sticks

For the next 3 months (until the summer break), studentmedic will be off to a district general hospital outside the big city. This means 3 months of perhaps limited internet activity (although I am told they have a 24 hour computer room – ooh the excitement!), lots of hospital food and literally living my career choice. I will be living within hospital grounds, doing my daily tasks there and shopping not far away. By the time I come back to the city, I will have had the chance to spend a day with an ambulance crew, done a course on suturing (stitching up wounds, for those who don’t know), and spent almost every waking hour in the hospital.

Perhaps to some people this would be a vision of hell. It does have several appeals though: I was born in the city where I now study, I have never lived anywhere else for more than a 1 month holiday. Not only that, but living on hospital grounds means I can literally wake up half an hour before I have to be in each day (or even less if I rush). When I finish my day, there won’t be a massive journey back to my humble abode, it will be a 2 minute walk away.

Of course, during the weekends I will be helping the local Green Party with campaigns for the May 2006 elections. Anyway, I can’t say what will happen to my blogging frequency: depending on ease of access to the net, it could go up or down. I will try my best to keep things going.

Merge?

The NHS is forever merging smaller hospitals together with claims of greater efficiency and better value for the public. However, the evidence contradicts this. It was stated in the BMJ during 1999, that economies of scale only apply to hospitals that have less than 200 beds. Given that the mean NHS hospital size in the UK is 300, and the optimal size for a hospital is between 200 and 400, why merge hospitals together? In fact, once we reach 600 beds in a hospital, prices start to increase again.

There are other good arguments for smaller hospitals: smaller hospitals are more likely to be directly attached to their local community. This means that the community will be more involved with the hospital, and it will probably be more accountable (or at least more closely watched) than a detached ’super-hospital’. Local services, near people’s homes, make them easier to access, reducing the disincentive to access healthcare and reducing congestion as people don’t need to travel quite so far.

Of course, for some specialist procedures, specialist centres are better and thus it is better to have referral centres – but this is only for a minority of hospital care in the NHS. For ‘bread and butter’ cases, however, small and local hospitals are best.

Relevant Green Party Policy

H304 Primary and hospital care will be more closely integrated. District staffing structures will be reviewed, with the aim of integrating hospital-based specialists into primary care and community health workers into hospital practice. The hospital programme will emphasise the development of appropriately-sized district and community hospitals, with a reduced role for larger regional centres. However, some specialised services will continue to be provided on a regional or sub-regional basis.

The Tories want government to use Open Source software in order to save money: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6430069.stm.

I don’t think they have really grasped what open source is, how different the model of getting things done is and how different it is from the Conservative world vision. Open Source is not simply a money saving exercise: it is about communities working together to produce good products and not putting patents on the result of their labours so that others can improve on them and use the material as they wish. In short, it is a progressive and new way of doing things! I don’t think it is just they money saving method that the Tories wish to reduce it to.

Healthy Food

Boots has started labelling its Chicken Salad sandwiches with “Superfood: Tomatoes”. I suggest they take it further and label their carrot cake with “Superfood: Carrots”… After all, we are all passionate about getting the healthy eating message across.