COVID-19: NHS Death Cult.

 I've mentioned the wife is a care manager before. She's currently dealing with a Covid outbreak at one of the homes she manages.  The virus has spread despite workers wearing full PPE. Thankfully only the workers have been affected, none of the residents have shown signs. Until now.

Similar stories are going round the care community that this new variant of the virus gets round all the usual protection (masks, face shields, aprons and gloves). 

Certainly it seems a magnitude more transmissable. The jury is out on whether it is getting through masks, or it's transmitted by a small slip-up in PPE protocol. At the wife's home, because the staff and none of the residents are affected, then it does lend credence to the slip up in PPE protocol theory, or that the virus spreads past masks when being in close proximity for long periods.

Obviously the wife is stuggling to cover staffing with the majority of staff off. The two ladies left working in the home have stepped up and worked long hours to cover. That's how care workers do things because they care.

However, it's the treatment of people in care by the NHS that I want to concentrate on here.

With an outbreak amongst the staff, everyone at the home is wary of the residents coming down with covid. Being learning disability there isn't the option to test them like a normal person would be, so it's a case of monitoring symptoms and reporting back.

Yesterday one of her residents had a temperature and started with a cough. All the protocols were followed, the resident was already isolated because of the staff outbreak. So the residents GP was called.

The immediate reaction of the GP was to get the home to call 999 and get the resident taken to hospital. No test, no confirmation of covid, just scoop them up and dump them in the plague ward. If they didn't have covid, you can bet within hours they would.

So, they dutifully called 999 and the first response of the ambulance service was for the home to confirm the resident had a DNAR form. A Do Not Attempt Resuscitation Form. That tells you what the priorities of the NHS are.

So, attempting to get the resident some care, rather than an NHS death sentence, the home rang 111 to get a more balanced opinion. The response was why did the home go against the GP's instructions? 

So, it seems there is an agenda in the NHS to just assume covid, scoop the patient up and dump them on a covid ward. Where if they didn't have covid before, they will certainly contract it.

It's fucking shit. This pandemic has shown the worst of the NHS. Rather than save lives, they would rather condemn people to death. 

Don't get me started on the lack of care for cancer patients. Patients with advanced tumours that are not getting the treatment that could possibly save their lives.

The NHS has become a death cult. 

To me it looks like the switch has flipped. This is now the establishment killing people off. With the new Police fines, it's the establishment against the people.

There will be a reckoning.

COVID-19: Changing Goalposts

The Mrs is currently scrabbling to comply with new guidelines released by the Care Quality Commission.

Over two months into the outbreak, the CQC has now issued an edict that registered care home workers should be wearing PPE at all times. Masks and gowns at all times and face shields when doing close personal care. Just like I was saying weeks ago.

The wife is now scrabbling to get supplies of PPE through from head office. She doesn't order it directly.

Of course if someone in the care home now contracts COVID-19 in between the edict being released yesterday and when the PPE actually arrives for use, guess who gets it in the neck?

Considering it was obvious two weeks ago and more that PPE should be worn as a barrier between carers and their clients, it's been a bloody long time coming. But of course the Mrs couldn't pre-empt any decision and buy PPE beforehand. She can only buy it now it's been deemed necessary.

Strangely it's only registered care homes. Other forms of care like supported living that work in exactly the same way are exempt from the PPE rules.

That's because they don't come under the CQC and any deaths are reported differently. They just get reported like deaths in the community.

Registered care homes count, (literally) because deaths are reported to the CQC and those statistics are collected by the ONS and are now starting to be reported on the news.

I can say quite cynically the deaths in registered care homes has shocked the government into action. Way too late.

It was quite obvious at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak that PPE should have been worn by carers as a barrier to them infecting care home residents and also a barrier to them being infected, as well as cross-infection between ill and healthy residents.

If it was good enough for hospital wards, it's good enough for care homes.

I hope the CQC will be taken to task on this.

I also hope it will show why the social care sector really needs to be classed as the same status as the NHS, if not absorbed into it.

The Ticking Time Bomb Within the Care Industry

Ticking Time Bomb, Sword of Damocles, call it what you will, but there is a looming crisis that threatens to obliterate swathes of the care sector.

What is this crisis you may ask? It's the enforcement of six years back pay to sleep workers. Forcing employers to pay the difference between what they were paid (an overnight retainer) and what the government say they should be paid (a full shift at minimum wage) for all their sleep shift employees for the past six years. For a care company who could have several sleep shift employees, that's a big bill that's suddenly been thrust on them.

This is no idle threat, the financial burden will cripple a large part of the care sector and homes will close because of this.

A lot of care companies are paid only minimal sums and they are struggling to cope with the burden of regulation, training and the minumum wage. Profits have been squeezed and investment is none-existent. Those companies that do things properly are the ones worst hit because they struggle to make a profit.

I did say when the minimum wage came out that it would hit the care sector hard. My wife was working alternate awake and sleep night shifts. The arrangement was she was paid the standard hourly rate while she worked, so from 8-10pm and from 6-8am she was paid hourly rate. Between those hours she was paid a fixed retainer, not the hourly rate because she was sleeping and not working. IF she was woken to deal with a client, then she would be paid hourly rate for the time she was awake and working.

But in comes the minimum wage, with no differentiation in the legislation as to whether the employee is working or not working while on the premises. No differentiation, a sledgehammer that says the employee is on the premises so even though they are tucked up in bed they are to be classed the same as the person on the awake shift doing the cleaning, washing, ironing etc.

As you can imagine, the ruling that minimum wage be paid regardless of whether the employee is working or sleeping went down like a lead balloon in most care establishments. So now most have moved to having two awake staff on shift. No longer can students earn easy money while they sleep in care homes.

Most care homes have a minumum staffing level. It may mean they have to have a minimum of two staff available. The sleep shift was a cheaper way to ensure two staff at the home while the residents slept and there wasn't the workload for two staff. Now two awake staff have to be on shift, for a shift that doesn't really need two staff on it.

I could say that the more unscrupulous care homes will just downsize to one awake staff overnight, raising the risk level and breaking the rules. It'll take a tragedy like a fire at a care home with a single member of staff struggling to evacuate residents to highlight the issue.

Of course care costs will increase because of this and local authorities, supposedly cash strapped as they are will not pay. There will be care homes and businesses that become insolvent because of this.

In the end who wins and who loses?

Certainly the residents of the homes that rely on the care lose out because they lose their homes.

But I'm struggling to find out who wins in this scenario.....

The very Ancient and Outmoded Labour Party (Part 2).

I was thinking and I think I've hit what it is about Labour that upsets me. It has failed to be aspirational. Sure, it aspires to be in power, but what after that? Nothing. Maybe it moves the deckchairs around a bit, but nothing truly inspirational. It's fiddling at the margins.

When I say aspirational, I mean for the working class it purports to respresent. What plans does it have to make the lot of the working class better?

A popular policy would be to outlaw zero hours contracts. The heinous things trap people by demanding exclusivity, but not rociprocating by providing a decent working week, every week.

In my mind, exclusivity means the company should pay the worker even though they are not working, because the company they are contracted to is preventing them from working for someone else.

If the company states you cannot work for anyone else, then they should be forced to pay a retainer to the employee. Of course minimum wage legislation means that the employee should be paid minimum wage even if they are not being used.

This is a very similar concept to the IR35 legislation that affected IT contractors.

Ok, a zero hours contract is a step up from employing people as self-emplyed contractors (e.g the so-called "Gig Economy") so the employer pays national insurance etc. but the exclusivity clause means that the employee should be paid for the time they are unable to work for anyone elase.

There should also be legislation aginst penalising people that cannot work at a certain time because they are working for someone else.

The legislation should make the agreement fair and equitable to both parties. At the moment the advantage is all towards the employer.

Another area Labour can help working people is social care. Wages in the social care sector are generally the lowest possible. A vast number of people are working for minimum wage despite having the qualifications and responsibility of administering medication and attending to the social welfare of their clients.

A move to professionalise the social care sector, maybe with union representation is sorely needed, it needs to be brought up to the same status as nursing. Having someone having access to and able to give medication including controlled drugs after a basic one day training course, or worse filling in a questionaire in my mind is just wrong. The discrepancy between social care and the medical profession is massive..

Workers in the care sector need to demonstrate a knowledge of social care and safety legislation. The basic care certificate introduced by CQC goes some way towards this, but more is needed.
More professionalism should improve wages for a sector with some of the poorest. That's what I mean by Labour being aspirational: introducing policies and legislation to improve the conditions of the poorest workers, the ones that are really being exploited.

Of course improved wages in the care sector then increases costs, but as I've previously mentioned, improved professional status will make it easier for the NHS then to take on social care and integrate it with the rest of the NHS, allowing patients in hospitals to be moved out of hospital wards.

A penny or two on income tax or national insurance to pay for the integration of social care budgets into the NHS budget wouldn't be baulked at by the majority of people. It would be a winning policy for Labour.

The very Ancient and Outmoded Labour Party.

It's a pity UKIP didn't win the Stoke by-election, with a defeat 2-0 the Labour party might have taken the hint and sacked their leader, Leicester FC-style.

Instead, with a score draw, the Tories can claim a historic result and Labour can carry on deluding themselves that things are fine and dandy, although the claim that Corbyn hasn't lost a by-election will have to be quietyly shelved. Not that it was much of a claim, the incumbent party almost never wins seats when in power.

The fact that the Labour party is really only relevant to students who have never lived a life, champagne socialists in London and militant socialists in Liverpool who have never grown up really, really upsets me. More than it should I know, but I still understand what the Labour party stood for way back when.

It stood up for the working man, it persuaded and didn't need thuggery to press it's point, because it was RELEVANT to the working man.

The working man could see the point of paying a small payment into a scheme so that we could have free health cover.

The working man could see that paying a small sub to a Union to protect him from overbearing employers.

But where is the relevance of the Labour party these days? Union leaders are seen hob-nobbing in posh restaurants with fat-cats, their leader really wants to do away with the Monarchy and wants a republic, he wants to do away with nuclear weapons, the very things that have kept the Russians from swallowing up the greater part of Europe. His policies are those of the trendy ultra-left, the sort of people who are miles away from the labourers, miners, steel workers, engineers and other blue-collar workers that made it.

They bicker and whinge about nit-picky irrelevances, like rights for every minority group going, including those that would deny them those very rights if they ever got in power.

Where is the working man or woman in all if this leftist irrelevance??

Nowhere. The left refuses to discuss substantive issues and place themselves in an electable position. For instance on the NHS they brook no discussion on how the NHS works, they would rather just shovel more and more cash into the black hole and naively hope more service comes out the other end.

The same mantra is pushed by the left regarding local services provided by councils.

Forget the fat cat bosses at the top earning six-figure salaries, forget the waste and the corruption, forget the lack of vocational nursing places, stopping working class girls getting a decent earning job.

Labour is now a party run largely by ultra-left socialist nutjobs that have absolutely no connection or empathy with the working man and would probably call working people fascists for daring even to earn money.

It just makes me sad that Labour is where it is, irrelevant to most of the people it originally set out to champion.

It makes me even sadder that the people Labour have cast aside still vote for them.