Ambush Predator

As ambulances queued in front of Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading last week, corridors full of patients were waiting for a bed on a ward. Emergency department consultant Omar Nafousi was at his wit's end. "We've no space," he told the BBC last week. "This is not what I signed up for when I became a doctor."

Like the appearance of Cheesy Footballs in the supermarkets and Cliff Richard on the sound systems, this is a regular part of winter. 

Currently nearly 4,000 beds in England alone are taken up by patients with flu, Covid and the vomiting bug norovirus, according to NHS England, and the situation is on a similar scale in the rest of the UK. But that is dwarfed by another pressure – the patients who should not be in hospital.

Such as?  

Every day there are more than 13,000 people whose treatment has been completed who are still in hospitals in England, the latest figures from NHS England suggest. Plus there are a further 4,000 around the rest of the UK - which means around one in eight beds are occupied by people who don't necessarily need to be there. Many of these "delayed discharge" patients are older and may be frail and living with multiple health conditions who need support in the community.

This isn't new, is it?  

The issue of delayed discharges is far from new. For years, it has been talked about, if not agonised over, and the NHS started tracking the delays in the early 2010s.

Tracking the delays - not solving them. Doesn't that just sum up the NHS? And now they are thinking the unthinkable.

Yet the problem throws up many deeper questions about the care system, coordination and planning in hospitals - with some doctors even asking whether the NHS is over-treating patients, particularly those at the end of life.

Yes, pay in to the obscene Ponzi scheme that is National Insurance all your working life, only to find some heir to Harold Shipman is going to consider you a burden to the glorious NHS and ship you off to die... 

Some NHS trusts have bought places in care homes to allow them to discharge patients. University Leicester Hospitals NHS Trust has taken this one step further: it has spent £10m buying and renovating a former care home in the city called Preston Lodge, which opened in July and has more than 50 beds.

And they'll tell you it's all for your own good: 

In Price's view, her own profession bears some responsibility, too. She says about a third of people who are admitted for medical reasons are in their last year of life. "We admit them and end up over-treating them with interventions, scans and pills," argues Price, who is president of the Society for Acute Medicine.

She says for many of these patients, palliative care and managing their symptoms, mainly pain, would be preferable: "Their quality of life would be much better and we would avoid a hospital admission."

I don't know why I'm surprised they are admitting it. 

 ...I'm sure he'll have his beady, ever blinking eyes on it.

“State media and government spokespersons have already signaled that this is a permanent shift, warning that unrestricted access will not return after 2026.”

 All the competence you experct from a Labour politician...

The ambitious project was announced on Tuesday (January 13), promising significant investment in northern transport infrastructure. Key features include a new Liverpool-Manchester line, major developments for an underground Piccadilly station, and the re-establishment of a Manchester-Birmingham route. Regrettably, the erroneous graphic failed to accurately represent these plans, reports the Manchester Evening News.

That's one way of putting it!  

Writing on social media, Mayor Brabin said: "The government has today committed to upgrade and electrify key rail links across Yorkshire, fix capacity at Leeds, and build a new Bradford station. As Mayors, we worked with Lord Blunkett, to make the case for Yorkshire's Plan for Rail and the government has listened to us."

Did they let Blunkett draw the map, perchance?  

Penguin breeding has been paused at a London aquarium after animal welfare activists argued the birds were 'trapped in a basement without sunlight or fresh air'.

Merlin Entertainments, which owns Sea Life London Aquarium, held a meeting last month with independent experts and animal welfare groups after a campaign calling for the release of the attraction's 15 gentoo penguins.

Not onto the streets of London, one hopes?  

I took a day off and went to the London Aquarium the year before last, having first visited soon after it opened back in the late 90s. Back then, it didn't have penguins, and was just an aquarium, quite a good one at the time, as I recall. But I found the years had not been kind to it. 

Now, it was clearly targeted heavily at children and school trips, and so full of ‘educational experiences’ with a very definite bent towards eco-mentalism, and the much vaunted ‘largest reef tank in the UK’ was indeed large but very lacking in diversity of fish and corals, being mostly full of the sort of inverts and fish that people just starting out in the reef keeping hobby would be recommended to keep. 

The penguins were a jarring sight - it just seemed wrong, having seen the amazing open air enclosures at London Zoo and Edinburgh Zoo, to see them shut up in such a place.

So on this aspect, I’m inclined to agree with the activists.

Merlin Entertainments has previously said its team of animal welfare specialists and aquarists cared for the penguins in their enclosure every day to make sure they were healthy and thriving, and the enclosure was on the ground floor and not the basement.

Semantics, they still have no natural light and fresh air! 

Laura Walton, co-director at Freedom For Animals, added: 'While we agreed that full release into the wild was, regrettably, not a viable option, concerted efforts will be ongoing to see whether the establishment of a penguin sanctuary for these and other suitable birds could offer lifetime care in a more suitable and naturalistic environment, incorporating natural sunlight and fresh air.'

Maybe London or Edinburgh Zoos should step up and offer them refuge. 

 

...I don't want to presume, but Matt appears to know it's drawbacks well.

 No 10 is a little too on the nose right now....

An NHS ambulance worker who was let go after her wife tried to beat their boss to death with a hammer has won an unfair dismissal claim against her former employer. Paula Smith had worked for the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) Trust for 26 years in the Patient Transport Service, helping to transport patients to and from hospital.

A role for which an elemernt of trust should be a requirement due to dealing with the genuinely vulnerable,  so understandably, her employers declsred her a liability. And a tribunal has declared they were wrong to sack her, just because she was in a relationship with an unstable violent woman.

It's as if risk profiling doesn't matter anymore...

She sometimes worked alongside her wife, Stacey Smith, who had a similar role, though the pair were not guaranteed time off together. But after a years-long dispute over shift patterns, Stacey attacked their boss, Michala Morton, in November 2023. Stacey had lain in wait outside Ms Morton's home in Tameside before bludgeoning her head with a hammer, fracturing Ms Morton's wrist as she tried to defend herself. She then sent a text to an unknown acquaintance, writing: 'I've done it. I've smashed her head in. Oppsie (sic) xx!'

And now Paula's in line for a big payout as a result.  I don't know why anyone does the Lotto these days. 

*You really couldn’t make it up! 

Joe and Kate Duffy were devastated and baffled when the man accused of their daughter's murder walked free from court. They had felt certain that Francis Auld would be found guilty of killing 19-year-old Amanda in Hamilton in 1992. But a jury found the charges against him not proven - one of two verdicts of acquittal which could be returned in criminal trials in Scotland.

But not any longer - for ‘progress’, it would seem. Has ever a word been so misused?

Joe and Kate did not initially understand what the jury's verdict meant – and have now spent more than three decades campaigning for the abolition of not proven.

From 1 January, this centuries-old verdict has been consigned to the history books and Scottish trials will end with the accused being found either guilty or not guilty.

Making Scotland no longer unique. 

A common interpretation of not proven was that the jury suspected the accused was guilty, but felt the prosecution had failed to prove the charge beyond reasonable doubt.

Good luck finding that in a law book. As Joe and Kate were to discover, there was no written legal definition of not proven. Over the years, whenever juries asked, all judges could tell them was that it was a verdict of acquittal, just like not guilty. Research has also shown that some people thought - incorrectly - that the accused could be tried again if the verdict was not proven.

If that was a reason for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it was the wrong one: 

That has been allowed in exceptional circumstances since 2011 under double jeopardy legislation, but the method of acquittal plays no part in that process.

So why the push to throw out centuries of Scottish legal tradition, something native born Scots usually rail against?  

Joe explained: "I've never understood why you can have two verdicts which mean exactly the same thing. 

"The only difference in law between not proven and not guilty is spelling. "That's it. Why do we need them? Either you're guilty or not guilty."

Well, now that's indeed all you can be. It's too early to tell if it's been a terrible mistake or not. I know how I'd vote, though... 

A woman who was filmed giving CPR to a man fatally injured in a road crash is calling for photographs and videos of crash sites to be made illegal.

Oh, presumably because the grieving relatives saw it on social media before being formally advised? Well, actually, no: 

I've since spoken to Dominic's family and they learned from the police initially," Ms Ferris said. "But very soon afterwards they received a message saying, 'I'm so sorry to hear about your cousin' and the video attached - of him lying in the street, in the dark, in the rain. "How that must have felt? I can't even imagine."

Once again, 'feelings' are prioritised by the emotionally incontinent and legislation is demanded to soothe them, with no thought for how such legislation is supposed to work.... 

The mother-of-two is calling for legislation to make it a criminal offence to record at such scenes. "Having been in a video in such tragic circumstances, it beggars belief why people want to do that," she said.

I agree, bur what beggars MY belief far more is why you think you have the right to demand new legislation when there's existing legislation, and it works:

There is already a law in place which makes it an offence to improperly use the public electronic communications network. Last month, a woman was arrested over the alleged sharing of images of a pedestrian who was knocked down and killed in Newry city centre.

See?  

People have joked that I will become the Lord of the Flies,' Knight laughs.

Who he? Oh, sorry:

The 120,000 sq ft facility, based in Lincolnshire, is aiming to breed millions of larvae to feed British livestock and, eventually, humans. The £1.5 million farm, which has its own chief scientist, aims to produce 3,500 tons of insect protein a year using the black soldier fly, a South American species that is the star of insect farming due to its high protein content and ability to compost waste. The harvested protein will go into pet food and this year, thanks to a change in UK law, feed British pigs and poultry. It will also be utilised to produce oils, fertilisers and other products that can be used in cosmetics and medical products. The facility, owned by group Fairman Knight & Sons, aims to feed the flies and their larvae using vast amounts of food waste produced by UK agriculture.It is the brainchild of Julian Knight, a former City financier, and William Fairman, who has been farming for more than 35 years.

Maybe you should have Googled who the 'Lord of the Flies really is, chum. Certainly seems appropriate for someone pushing this slop...