I know what she is like.   If she thinks she can fake being well enough she would say anything to get out, and if they let her out on the understanding that she takes it easy she would agree to all that and then come home and start over-exerting herself.  It’s just the way she is.  The doctors say she needs to stay for 10 days until she doesn’t need intravenous injections any more, so if all goes to plan she should come home on Wednesday.  If, however, the doctors then say they need a day or so to be sure she is fit to leave at least the carrot being dangled will stop her insisting on coming out against advice.

I just hope she hasn’t heard of the Dell Alienware Area-51 or I won’t see her here until next month!

Well done to the NHS for doing such a good job in such a bloody awful building.  And it is a terrible building.  The hospital is a sprawling place with a maze of corridors, about a quarter of a mile from one end to the other.  I really think that a more compact layout with several more stories would be more sensible.   Another thng about the layout is that there are not many doors, or not closed ones anyway, so air conditioning doesn’t do a great job.  It is never working to keep an enclosed area cool but is having any coolness leeched away into corridors, and on to the outside world since a lot of the doors to the many courtyards are open.

A tower block with a smaller footprint would surely be more effective in many ways.

The one good thing about the hospital facilities, from a visitor’s point of view, is the shop.  The league of friends run a nice little coffee shop which charges reasonable prices.  You get so used to outlets with a captive customer base trying to screw the customers that it makes a change when you find they don’t charge £1.50 for a can of coke.  Just look at the WH Smith in an airport, motorway services or rail terminus to see how usually works.  Apparently that is coming to an end though.  The hosptal is closing down the shops run by volunteers on a not-for-profit basis and having franchises of places like Tesco, Smiths, Boots, Costa or places like that.   Instead of £1.30 for a filter coffee and a packet of posh biscuits it will a few pounds for a skinny decaf flatscreen Americano.  Not good when you have gone up there in an unplanned emergency situation like I did, with only a few pounds on you, most of which went on the car parking.

I was only able to have a coffee at all because I saved at least six pounds by parking in the golf club car park instead of the hospital car park.  The hospital keep trying to introduce parking charges for staff and the consequence of that will probably be that the golf club car park gets full up by 7am.

It wouldn’t have been such a problem if I had realised there was an ATM on the site.  I just assumed that if there was one it would be one of those ones that charges you to withdraw your own money, and I automatically and unconsciously don’t count them.  Apparently not, and I am kicking myself.  Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that go.  It would fit in with all the other ways the management are trying to gouge staff, patients and visitors out of a few quid.  It is getting to the point where a visit to Thorpe Park will be cheaper than a day visiting somebody in hospital.

Fortunately for Jayne the medical attention is better than the structure, and we never had to worry that any treatment for what is, after all, a life-threatening disease would be jeopardised by a lack or funds or insurance and had no risk of bankrupting ourselves for treatment.  Worth bearing in mind when attempts to dismantle the NHS start getting mentioned again.

And then she went to Frankie & Charlie’s NYE party, after which I had to practically carry her home…  she says that this morning’s headache was self-inflicted and totally expected so it doesn’t count so she is not writing anything down.  Just as well really.  If there is any justice it would have been right off the scale!

Surely in today’s world you shouldn’t use a bit of photocopied paper for that sort of thing anyway.  Sounds like a candidate for a blog.

1. I am guessing a bit.  Haven’t actually studied it

To oversimplify it, the Surrey & Sussex NHS Trust (SASH) has had a post of Trade Union Facilitator (TUF) for about four years now.  The position is elected by all the unions in the trust and the person who is elected is seconded into the post, which is paid by the trust.

The trust have now decided that they are making the post redundant and are replacing it with a new post of Trade Union Convenor.  The new post will be an appointment by management.  The current TUF has been told she is ‘at risk’ and will be made redundant along with the job.

What is wrong with that?

First of all there is the principle that the unions would be represented by a management appointee.  This will not be somebody who the staff will feel is on their side, and it removes the staff’s representation.   Will the new convenor really stand up to the management when it counts?  Or ever?

This a bad precedent to be setting.

In this case the incumbent has been a very effective campaigner, fighting to keep a shuttle bus service between Crawley and the East Surrey Hospital for staff and patients to use, leading to suspicions that the move is designed to remove somebody who has been a thorn in the side of the trust management and board for a long time. Victimisation in other words.

With the removal of the current TUF role (which the unions were not consulted on at all) the incumbent, Zena Dodgson, will not revert to the original job she was seconded from, or a similar job.  The trust say that she has been doing it so long that it is now her substantive job, although I would be willing to bet that is not what her contract says.

In that case it should mean that she should be offered the new role which, on paper at least, is similar to her current job, but that is not an option either.  The trust really are trying to have it both ways.

This would obviously have a big impact on Zena, making her unemployed, but it has other results too.  The local Unison branch would lose a senior officer – if she was no longer an NHS employee she would not be eligble for the office – which they can ill afford to do.  The hospital would also stand less chance of meeting criteria for foundation trust status – failing with Core Standard C17 which states “the views of patients, their carers and others are sought and taken into account in designing, planning, delivering and improving health care services.”

If the trust fails to get foundation trust status it could have serious effects on the healthcare in the Horsham/Crawley/Horley/Redhill area as the trust could end up getting moved into another foundation trust elsewhere and management would be even more remote from local influence.

Another impact is that if the trust go ahead with this then there is every chance that staff at the trust could find themselves considering industrial action, because Zena is very popular amongst the staff there for all the work she does on their behalf, and that is something nobody really wants.  If we can do anything to prevent them needing to turn to that last resort then we should.

What is happening about this?

Obviously Unison are giving legal support and advice as any union would for any member.  However, they can’t really do much in legal terms unless and until the employment is terminated, which in many respects is too late.  They can get compensation which for many people would be enough, but that would still leave the trust with a glove puppet instead of proper staff representation.

Staff in the hospital have been signing a petition on the noticeboards, and members of other unions in the area have offered support.  They intend to turn up at the hospital at the time Zena’s appeal interview takes place to lobby the trust and show their support.

Other members of health unions, and other unions, across the country have written to the trust’s chief executive to express their opinions on the situation.

What can I do about it?

There are a few things that anybody can do:

• Read more about the case – don’t just take my word for it.  You can Google “Zena Dodgson” and find lots of references like this and this.
• Pass the word around.  Make the case more widely known.  If you are in a union or progressive political party pass this information on to your members.  Tweet it. Blog it.
• Write to the SASH chief executive Gail Wannell (details in the links above) in a personal capacity.
• Get your local union branch or party branch to write
• Turn up at East Surrey Hospital for 3pm on December 8th and join the lobby.  If you want to do that and need transport I can put you in touch with the local trade council who will help – although the contacts in the links above would be able to do that too.
• Or if you know somebody who works at the trust, see if they would want to go along to make the support more visible.

Is this just a party political thing?

Far from it.  Zena Dodgson is not a member of the Labour Party.  In fact, she is a member of the Respect crowd who  is as likely to be attacking our local Labour MP in the newspapers as the trust board and whose fellow left-wing fringe colleagues stand against Labour and nearly caused us to lose the Crawley seat at the last general election.

This is one of those cases where solidarity amongst workers and trade unionists in the face of victimisation and injustice are more important than party matters.

Apparently the ? is part of his name so that he doesn’t get confused with Robert Smith of the Cure…  I would have thought that being “Robert A Smith” or similar would have done the trick.

I had a glance through the paper.  It is full of graphs and increasingly complicated equations, but they all seem to boil down to “cut their heads off”.

The conclusion is:

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.

Wise words mate, but not a surprise to anybody familiar with the works of George A Romero.

By the way, is there a bit of subtle humour going on at the BBC?  The caption to the photo in their story says “There has been a revival of the zombie film in recent years”.  Hmmm… like the genre just keeps coming back fronm the dead…

Returning to Britain I saw a small poster – A4 perhaps. No more than A3 – about the flu.  Very re-assuring in a way.  The scale of the French posters made it all seem imminent, while the British ones had a sense of just going through the motions.  I imagine (hope) it is a bit different at airports where people are arriving from Mexico and the US.

I travelled back on the train to Crawley, safe in my sense of false security, and arrived home to find that there are rumours of a couple of suspected swine flu cases in Broadfield, involving some people who recently returned from the US.  Don’t know if it is true, or where the rumours started, but worrying if true.

Known side effects of Tamiflu, taken from the Roche website: “Rare but serious skin reactions and allergic reactions … children and adolescents may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking Tamiflu and should be closely monitored for signs of unusal behavior. The most common side effects … are mild to moderate nausea and vomiting.” Known side effects of Relenza, from the GlaxoSmithKline website: “Some patients have had bronchospasm (wheezing) or serious breathing problems … Relenza has not been shown to shorten the duration of influenza in people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease … the most common side effects with have been headaches; diarrhea; nausea; vomiting; nasal irritation; bronchitis; cough; sinusitis; ear, nose, and throat infections; and dizziness. Other side effects that have been reported, but were not as common, include rashes and allergic reactions, some of which were severe.”

So.  Two medical treatments, that don’t cure a condition but relieves symptoms have some side effects, some of them severe, and all acknowledged by the manufacturer.  The only criticism of these drugs in the medie is that the country doesn’t have enough of them.

Meanwhile, another medical treatment that does actually prevent a potentially fatal illness is demonised because those same tabloids choose to believe an isolated, un-repeated and unconfirmed test that says it might be linked with something else – the MMR vaccine.

When it comes to aything vaguely scientific the newspapers’ reaction – specifically papers like the Daily Mail – appears to be dictated more by blind prejudice than any scientific rigour.  In fact  it is like the course of an oil tanker: very hard to shift.  I reckon there is a snap decision of what attitude to take and once that is taken the paper has to hold its course despite any future evidence because it is unable or unwilling to be seen to change its mind.

I actually wonder if, in the long term, there will be more casualties from the campaign against MMR vaccines than from swine flu.

When I say “we” I am not including anybody who works for the media of course: they are loving it.  The whole tone of coverage just makes me think they will all be bitterly disappointed if there are not several thousand deaths, preferably in Britain – which are the only one that really count in our media.

I was watching Sky News over my Sugar Puffs this morning¹ and some expert was saying how he thought the outbreak was going to die out.  When he sensed the palpable disappointment of the presenters he made an effort to cheer them up by pointing out how such a thing could be a lull before the storm like it was with the Spanish flu.  Guess which bit of that interview they would be most likely to repeat and stress?

The old saying that “no news is good news” is interpreted as “good news is not news” in media land isn’t it?  If this flu does spread any more I expect the first casualties in the UK to be Daily Mail journalists dying from over-excitement.

Anyway, nice to see that some companies have some definite contingency plans in place…  those HR types… so warm-hearted and cuddly aren’t they?

1. Other breakfast cereals are available

Apparently it takes some time to get used to wearing varifocals, and some people never do get used to them.  Its brilliant to not have to carry two pairs and keep swapping them, but weird having to learn how to use a pair of glasses.   The opticians said that if I don’t get on with them I can swap them or get my money back if I decide I can’t handle varifocals, and I can take up to three months to decide.

Sounded over the top to me.  How hard can it be to look through glasses?  Harder than I imagined actually.

I bought a Guardian today to test the glasses out, and it was difficult to keep looking through the right bit of the lenses.  I kept moving my eyes instead of my head and looking through the medium-range bit so it was all more blurred than without glasses at all.  I am told that it becomes second nature, but for a time I will be bobbing my head up and down a lot as I find the right angle for everything, and that all new wearers of varifocals look like a nodding dog in the back shelf of a car.  Thats my excuse for coking up the Kakuro puzzle anyway

The other thing to get used to is the fact that the prescription part of the lenses is only in a strip down the middle.  I was warned of this and told that it means you have to rely more on moving your head from side to side like you are watching tennis.  That is going to take a lot of getting used to because when I read I don’t tend to move my head much.

What they didn’t warn me about is the disconcerting way everything wobbles when you move your head.  You know the effects they sometimes use on TV when going into a flashback?  When the picture is sort of tilted from side to side diagonally?  With varifocals its a bit like that.

At the moment I find it easier without glasses at all, but I know that just leads to headaches so I’ll persevere for now.   There must be a good reason the opticians allow a few months to adjust to this type of lense, and I think I have discovered it, and have to accept that if I do get used to these it is not going to happen overnight.

They look good though.  Jayne is happy and no longer calls me Harry Potter like she did with the old ones.  Unfair of her really – I laways thought they were more Alf Garnett than Harry Potter.