Tag Archives: politics

Excuses, delays, death and social murder

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George Julian has taken on the grim task of working her way through responses to Freedom of Information requests she sent to every Integrated Care Board (ICB) in England. [The words ‘integrated care board’ ratchet up my snooze button so I’m trying to stay jiggy writing this, not succumb to the malaise and weariness these terms generate.] George asked them for their latest Leder data and publication plans for their next reports. She was trying to find out the state of play with the data that has been collected by each ICB since the data included in the latest (2023) Leder report (published in Sept). Each ICB feeds its data/reports to the mothership now based at Imperial College under the quiet (silent even) steer of Prof Strydom.

[I took a trip down blog memory lane and found this post about the 2017 Leder review, also published late and covered up. There is form here. Depressing to note the publication of the review generated live national news coverage then. Now it’s as if someone has left the report on the returned book shelves at an unmarked local library.]

So what can we conclude from the ICB responses to the Leder process?

  1. Rumours of changes to the Leder programme.
  2. No dosh to do the work effectively and an associated lack of staff with dedicated time.
  3. Problems with systems, accessing and uploading data. Outages and smoutages.
  4. ICB restructuring has worsened the process. [There’s always a restructure to be had].
  5. Delay, delay, excuses, excuses and a further muddying of report years and deaths reported.

It’s fair to say the Leder process has erased any consideration of the people who died. It’s a clunky, dilapidated conveyor belt of ‘notifications in’, ‘complete reviews’ out and a growing number of unfinished reviews. A dogs dinner. A flawed process which has descended into farce. Hints and whispers of ‘this process is shite’, ‘who cares’, and ‘I don’t want to do this’ foot stamping.

And then chillingly Dorset report: “Approximately 90% of all reviews have identified little or no significant learning in the last year, which raises the question of the value of completing a review for every case.”

Get that sledgehammer out Dorset and smash the remaining bits of humanity, respect and reason for trying to learn from the premature and often avoidable deaths of people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people.

There’s no new learning, people are gonna die cos we ain’t changing shite so let’s just stop reviewing every death.

And there I was, literally a month ago, publishing a book about the social murder of people with learning disabilities.

Playing games

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Now. I ain’t no politician. And I don’t claim to know an awful lot about the structure and process of British politics. Well, barely anything really.

But I do know that, unless you are an exceptional person, if you have the life experience of – very rich family, public school and Oxbridge education (most likely studying PPE) and straight into politics – you ain’t really going to know diddly squit about anything other than being very rich and privileged. Nothing.

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Twitter; what’s the point?

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I love Twitter. But lots of people I know, don’t. They don’t get it. They hold onto facebook as a space for sharing stuff with chosen, monitored and policed others. Facebook is more intimate, apparently, and isn’t about stalking Scoph, Stephen Fry or Justin Beiber. Facebook doesn’t restrict status updates to 140 characters. What can you say in 140 characters for fuck’s sake? Well, I’ll come back to that..

I went to a social media talk recently by an expert from York University. He strongly cautioned against our increasing over reliance on social media, saying it would lead to us all creating very narrow social lives, funnelling down, bookmarking our favourite websites and increasingly closing ourselves off to broader social experiences. Facebook can do that. We select certain people that we allow into our circle and can even restrict levels of access to our personal lives. It is static, dated and restrictive.

Twitter smashes things wide open. Even though we choose who we follow, once we follow people, we can’t choose what they retweet to us. So if I was to follow 100 people, and they each followed a hundred people, and so on and so on (I ain’t no mathematician so I’m not even going to attempt to develop this equation/sum), that means I am potentially open to shedloads of information, in bite size pieces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you twitter doubters say. What-effer. You can interact via email or facebook. Not as fast or as effectively. Increasingly, Twitter is part of media stories about particular events. Twitfeed is feeding into live tv and news coverage. It’s forcing governments, institutions, people to be more accountable. Through Twitter, a recent petition against proposed NHS reform has got over 170,000 signatures in a few days. Through Twitter a group of disabled people were able to raise funding, research, write up and disseminate their report into the proposed Welfare Reform Bill. Through Twitter (not through the BBC or other media channels) we know that Andrew Lansley’s recent trip to the Royal Free ended up with him being chased by a doc down the corridor to the words “Your bill is rubbish. And you know it!” Through Twitter, people are able to demonstrate and provide evidence of lies, deceit and cheating (largely by the current UK government at the mo’).

What can you tweet in 140 characters? Well, a lot. You’ve just got to be concise, pithy and cut out so much crap that we usually produce/circulate. It’s a liberating experience.

Twitter is what you make it. Depending on who you follow. It can be supportive, political, social, entertaining, funny, informative, creative and always fresh.

Finally, for mates that have shouted ‘help!, I don’t know how to use it’.. here are a few things that I’ve learnt in the last few months (or days;);

  • Use bit ly to shorten web links you want to tweet.
  • Don’t get overly hung up on what you tweet – just have fun
  • At first you are tweeting to yourself, but people will start to follow you
  • Don’t get hung up on numbers…
  • … but if your followers start to unfollow you en masse, you may want to revisit your tweet content 😉
  • #ff means follow Friday and is a way of sharing ‘good’ people to follow

Now, if someone wants to let me know the best way to manage lists, that would be great.