Breathtakingly callous even for the Nasty Party

There's going to be a big bump in youth homelessness when kids leaving care or young people trying to get away from violent or abusive families can no longer claim JSA or housing benefit until they’re 26.

Equally great news for anyone 'in work' on a minimum wage zero hours contract who's struggling to cover their rent and using food banks now.

Disgusting policy, I assume targeted because under 25's vote less and duped middle classes will not be as effected. How on earth are people who don't come from a stable/middle income family expect to avoid serious poverty?

All the while they are doing their best to try and privatise everything knowing they wont be in Government for long but in the knowledge that its far harder to re-nationalise and something which a future Labour / Lab-Lib coalition may not be able to afford.

Speaking directly to consultants I work with now who worked on optimising ER and hospitals, the main issues are dealing with peak flow through the system. The staff in place are not trained to think like operation directors or production managers, so the flow through the system is not optimised.

Basic example is cast broken limbs, legs take longer than arms so maybe you can do 1 leg + 1 arm or 3 arms but not 2 legs in a hour, so you have to structure the flow to optimise the resources better, it doesn't currently run like that. Solution is to optimise or increase bloated resources from an operations front.

None of that makes a difference if people go to ER for everything because they have to be seen because they don't go to a GP due to an appointment. So we need more GPs, longer opening hours etc. Clearly not enough GPs are being trained every year or existing GPs wont work shift hours / weekends, preventing immigrant GPs from working isn't helping matters either.

No idea if it is cheaper to have enough GPs to allow 24/7 appointments / callouts vs increasing the ER to allow peak flow of no appointment patients.




So you have too many people who go to ER rather than a GP for any issue

well in that simple example you would have a pool or waiting environment and a treatment environment the pool has a bigger capacity than treatment so you have a waiting time.

pressures on waiting time limits forces a first come first served approach of movement into the treatment room, say two legs are in a row to be treated, you are wasting capacity because an arm is blocked by the second leg, but in reality the leg and arm could be done at the same time, two legs cannot so the arm waiting time increases by a leg unnecessarily. if the pool was reached capacity 3 arms could be bumped up and get done at once, freeing pool space.

This would reduce overall waiting time, but increase for certain patients. This is obviously massive simplified, what normally happens is the pool overflows due to peak demand and spills over into other resource just to hold the queue.

The target for treatment time limits makes untrained ground staff run on the first come approach rather than a carefully planned out resource optimised approach.

Then again it is pointless fixing one area if the demand is just totally beyond the peak capacity of a system, hence the GP comment previously. The NHS should be optimised for throughput not individual waiting time goals.

The same thing is true anywhere, nobody aims to create an inefficient system, just the best they can design with their ability, if you are medically trained you cant really be expected to be highly skilled at optimisation skills purely by personal invention, you just get on with it.

Poverty safari.

Gays can officially marry tomorrow.

You don't need the card to vote but you have to vote at the polling station stated on the card.

I don't think you need ID normally, you just have to give your name and address (this would be your old address) as far as I remember.

With the card no ID needed, just confirm name and address.

Yeah can't see how that would go wrong.