bignumber5

Shawshank. A Knight's Tale. I don't know why, it just makes me chuckle Shrek, and a few other animated goodies that I am neither young enough nor parenty enough to really get away with Empire Records. I just love it And, sorry... Breakfast at Tiffany's Grease Dirty Dancing The Wedding Singer (joins keef in Drew's fan-club) Love Actually ...Glad to have got that cleared up, now has anyone seen my testicles? I know they must be around here somewhere...

Medicine used to be full of them in the days before access to information: In particular, to describe the appearance of someone who might not have any decernable syndrome but who didn't quite look right somehow, from FLK (funny looking kid) to NFN (normal for Norwich). But then the day came when patients were allowed to see their notes, and "the man" said that doctors were just being rude. A sad day indeed...

Trained in what? Management speak bollox that shows no real understanding of the specific idiosyncracies of the industry in question, glossed over with that wonderful job title "consultant", or training in actually managing that industry? A few years back, when an A&E department that I was working in was struggling with the monthly targets, the managers were all over us all day every day about what could be done to speed up waiting times. One of the managers even noticed that a lot of the problems were at night, and dutifully signed up for a night shift, volunteering to push wheel chairs and photocopy paperwork and generally do menial but time consuming things to speep up waiting times. After one night shift, one(and not even a particularly busy one) the man looked like Charlie Sheen at the end of Platoon, and he apparently gave a fairly spirit rebuttal in the next target meeting about how the management tier had absolutely no idea what the medical and nursing staff were doing on a daily basis and the pressure that they were under. Target not achieved that month. Manager took full responsibility without blinking. A short lived coup, and his memory proved even shorter as he was back on our backs the very next month, but it meant the world at the time. Healthcare managers are not (usually) clinicians, and for all that they have a plethora of skills in human resources and various other management guff, they do not understand the very basic concepts of the product that they are managing. Equally, I'm not suggesting that clinicians would necessarily make better managers - far from it, their micro-managment of specific areas without an overview would doubtless bugger up the whole system - but there needs to be a mutual understanding and a cooperative relationship between the 2. As a result of this, nursing and medicine have started to introduce management skills as one progresses up the career structure. But healthcare managers are not required to have any understanding of how healthcare should be delivered, and yet have the power to undermine clinical practice with local regulations put in place with managerial, fiscal or possibly even political motivation. The bottom line is that the NHS is, essentially, a business from the top down and a service from the bottom up: there's always going to be some uneasy territory in the middle where those ideologies meet. But chucking a management ultra-gimp, with a made up job title and skills that are only really relevant at the extreme business end, into the already uneasy middle ground is not the solution. Unfortunately, like all grass roots complainers, I have no idea what is.

Isn't it comfortable to find yourself on a road where you can actually start to make out your old footprints...?

Working til 8, but since it's my local... maybe a cheeky post-work pint on the way home ;-)

That pretty much sums up what i just don't get: I mean, having something that you really want on your body is one thing, to just want something but to have no idea what makes very little sense in my head.

I suspect that this may end up rehashing ground that we, the EDF, have covered well in our own little universe, but are we confusing a gagging order on certain topics with views on them that are often just not pleasant or acceptable to the members of the "society" in question? I mean, gagging order implies Stalin-esque censorship on freedoms as speech with serious adverse consequences for raising a topic, and that's one thing - being colloquially told to shut up by a consensus of people who disagree with your viewpoint is quite another.

indeed - a department that i used to work in once hired a management consultant to establish why the middle grade doctors were so disgruntled and what could be done about it. The management consultant concluded that motivational strategies were needed as the middle grade doctors felt over-stretched in their daily work environment. The middle grade doctors rota was a member of staff short. The consultant got paid more than a middle grade doctor to fill the slot would have cost. Can anyone not being paid stupid money spot the likely source of the doctors being overworked and a potential solution? Since this whole "consultancy" thing isn't a set up that I really understand, and certainly isn't one that I have any respect for, I think I'll step back now. Sorry for the rant.

Moos Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Sorry, Chair, I appreciate that this is somewhat > off topic. not really - the topic seems to be appropriate use of funds (or lack there of) and adding the details of what's appropriate for the industry adds valuable context

I think we know what kind of forums aren't moderated, and who goes to them: I'd really rather we didn't go down the extremistnutjob.com route...

i've been working in hospitals since i was 18, but at the significantly less profitable patient-care end, so i've got no idea how they are run either. One for MamoraMan, methinks...

wow, that shows how na?ve I am about the world of consultancy and accounting and all that guff - until I saw moos' post, i was going to point out the likelihood of it being a typo and them meaning to offer ?1000 for a week. I mean, a grand a day? that's stupid money!

So, fjd, if someone gives you a phone number you might be confused if they start oh-two-oh, and think they have some kind of complex telephonic contact involving letters, or do you just refuse the information on grounds of inappropriate delivery?

Flippin eck, enough with the constant whinging about the recently departed and whether or not views and needs that they may or may not have had were hypothetically given a chance to bloom, if indeed they existed, maybe. Every forum, hell every conversation, has an underlying tone based on the people involved. You don't walk up to a group of strangers at a party or in the pub, listen for a minute or 2, then declare "no, you're all boring and wrong and talking about the wrong things, here's what we're going to do now. Why don't you talk about this, it might possibly make others who aren't here feel more welcome, possibly". This would be strange, and after a while it would be annoying, maybe even annoying enough that a regular or possibly even the landlord might feel the need to have a word, and that would be pretty reasonable. No, you get a feel for whether or not you have common ground, and you engage. Calmly. Pleasantly. Maybe accepting that this new group might not be your kind of people. Either using that as a reason to move onto a different group, or maybe using the difference in opinion as a way to provoke a bit of thought in yourself and, if you are really good at that kind of chat, the others too. But if you loudly voiced opinions that were offensive to people in the pub, the landlord might even ask you not to return, and in doing so would hardly be oppressing you or the voice-hearing needs of the as yet potential persons and their views unknown. The dissect-the-incident whinging that seems to follow every little hiccup on this forum is almost as annoying as the incidents themselves: have admin and the moderators ever given cause to suggest that they are being oppressive or unreasonable? Maybe have a tiny bit of faith and even occasionally give them the benefit of the doubt: I think it's a small price for what I get back out of this forum, and I invite you to ask the same question of yourself.

...Big Al says so.

Well, except for the picture in your earlier post...

Beatrice or Zara?

None here. I've always assumed that the point of a tattoo was to have a unique mark, so the pick-one-from-the-parlour-book approach sort of defeats that, to my mind. Also, i change my opinion about whether or not i like a jacket every other month after i buy a new one - a permanent mark seems foolish for someone so changeable!

Not to wantonly disagree with The Chair, but I think that whether or not the war can be/should be assessed as illegal or legal by a serviceman does have a bearing on the original topic... After all, if a war can never be shown to be absolutely one or the other, then what impact does that have on the serviceman's defence for desertion? (Thanks, sorry Madame Chair... *ducks*)

There is a potential butterfly-effect endpoint, though: Because now people stand up to muggers, so if you're going to mug people then you have to mean business and maybe go armed as they might put up a fight. Maybe you need to have a low threshold for using your tool or starting proceedings with a swift whack as these damn people think it's all like standing up to a bully in the playground... And suddenly the number of muggings has gone down but the number of violent assaults during muggings goes up significantly. To be clear, I'm not advocating abject cowardice at all times to cover the vague possibility of adverse consequences, I'm just exploring the potential downsides of us collectively smacking a hoody on the nose with a rolled up copy of the guardian - I think it could be a dog that eventually bites back.

Tone, that really did make me chuckle! ;-) I have only ever had to write my CV for one profession, though a few jobs (if you see what I mean) and I keep a rough skeleton saved on my hard drive with all the dates of courses etc updated once I get home from said course - saves the pain that is trying to dig them out when you need them. Beyond that, a paraphrasing of Quids: focus the info to the post.

I agree with the sentiment but not necessarily with the conclusion drawn - if Mrs.number5 and I were to get mugged, for example, I might protect her from harm much more effectively by handing over my wallet as ordered and not getting us a beating. Getting into a resistance type scenario could get us both beaten up/stabbed/insert your gory outcome here, and then how would I have protected her? Maybe doing what I can in this case is minimising our risk of coming to harm, and realising that it's not worth getting knifed for the rather meagre contents of my wallet. That said, RosieH is quite right about reactions and their unpredictable nature: I suspect that we have a lot of cross-over with the "protect your home/castle" thread.

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone else, but I've only recently heard about Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, who (after completing a first tour in Afganistan) is refusing to return to active service, having written to Gordon Brown with the justification that the conflict is unlawful. He intends to use the same reasoning to defend himself in an upcoming court martial for desertion. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/aug/03/british-army-alleged-deserter-court Does an objection of this type, of logical reasoning rather than of conscience, justify a refusal to return to service? Is this the 21st Century equivalent of the conscientious objector, or is this man a deserter?

hata a oada fa ointlessa ollocksa - hata sa oura eala, omputedshortya? (I hope that's clear enough for you)

The point I was really trying to make is that people who disbelieve in God get pretty upset too...