On the cover of this months BMA news there was a call for Doctors to stand as independents in the forthcoming general election. In recent weeks I’d reached the same conclusion as we witness the continued destruction of the NHS by the current government, with no credible alternative on offer.

Doctors have all the qualities needed of a good politician built in. They are well educated, good communicators, honest, and most importantly, they put the needs of their patients above their own.

The commercialisation of the NHS is killing the institution. We are currently spending £350million per year on management consultants. Administration currently takes up 20-25% of the NHS budget. Primary Care Trust led “commissioning” is causing the postcode lottery that results in uneven health provisions and a PR disaster that kills faith in the NHS.

We are moving step by step to the American system of private healthcare. We need doctors to take the microphone and tell the country why this is a terrible change of direction. The NHS offers healthcare to all the population with better outcomes across the board than the US system, all for massively less money. The USA spends as more per person on publicly funded healthcare that only covers a no frills system for 25% of the population. This statistic is one of many that objectively illustrates how inefficient the market system for healthcare is.

We need the following promises from our leaders:

• Free healthcare for all at the point of access – never require insurance or money up front
• Scrap the compulsory market system currently in place
• Outright ban on management consultants – if we need a manager we will hire one. Outsourcing is too expensive and unnecessary for such a large organisation.
• Create a body that will analyse a new treatment in a week and make an interim decision on whether to offer it on the NHS. All areas will have to fall into line, removing the postcode lottery
• Requirement that any journalist covering a medical issue in a national newspaper or TV broadcast receives basic lessons in critical appraisal – stop the public health catastrophes like MMR occurring again

I’m sure doctors will have more suggestions and we need them.

I suggest Jobbing Doctor and John Crippen for our first choices. Their medical blogs are a must read.

The news this morning has been buzzing about the Tories’ announcement that, if elected, they will scrap the Sats test for 11 year olds. I think this is a wonderful idea. I’ve heard stories from teacher friends about children in tears with stress over exams at 11 years old. This situation should never happen.

Getting rid of Sats will leave a problem. How do we rank primary schools? Up to now league tables have been compiled based upon Sats results. Unions have long complained that this is an unfair criteria as poor children do worse than rich children no matter what teachers do. Fair point.

The answer to the problem already exists. Ofsted have been ranking schools based upon a huge array of criteria for a long time now. The only problem, as I see it, is the lack of objectivity in their rankings. Schools are notified long in advance of the inspection, causing schools to play the system as well as the inevitable observer bias. We also have no idea whether Ofsted are looking at the right things.

A simple research project could prove the usefulness (or lack thereof) of Ofsted’s rankings.

In healthcare there is a statistic often generated that predicts life expectancy at birth based on the socioeconomic background of their parents. Given socioeconomic data of a school pupils and their corresponding Sats results, a statistician could quite easily generate a “Sats results at birth” for the average child. From that number schools could be ranked based upon how their pupils score above or below that average.

If Ofsted rankings are objective one would expect a nice clear correlation between the ranking and a school’s performance (using the above correction for socioeconomic class). Once Ofsted results are proved consistent and objective, Sats can be comfortably scrapped while still maintaining an objective ranking system for school performance.

BT has recently been caught in a bit of controversy as it’s been reducing the speeds of broadband for customers on the cheapest package causing the BBC iPlayer to be virtually unusable. Customers understandably weren’t happy with this situation but in the small print BT make it clear they can indulge in these tactics.

Today BT have made a move that should concern anyone who values the internet. They are demanding:

[The BBC] need to make a fair contribution to the cost of delivering online video and other content.

They argue that the broadband market is so competitive that it’s unfair that they should have to pay to provide the bandwidth for such large content. They think it’s reasonable that the provider of the content chip in to help them out.

There are three big problems with BT’s argument.

1. BT want paying twice

When I pay for a broadband subscription, I’m paying to be able to access the internet at the speed and quantity (on capped connections) agreed in the contract. I pay money – the ISP gives me internet.

The BBC iPlayer is on the internet, therefore that’s what I pay for. It’s absurd for BT to then ask the BBC to pay them as well. The BBC already pay to produce the content and transfer the data from their servers to BT before they in turn transfer it to me.

If BT get their way, they will be being paid by both the customer and the BBC for exactly the same service.

BT can’t compete on price with other broadband providers so are looking at other revenue streams. In a fair market BT would either increase their prices, make less profit, or close up shop. Increasing prices won’t win them any customers, so instead they go out for a more indirect way of making up the difference.

2. Internet Neutrality

At the moment the internet is neutral. This blog post won’t be delivered to your browser any faster or slower than google or facebook or the iPlayer. Your broadband provider just sees data and doesn’t discriminate.

It’s this neutrality that’s allowed the internet to become what it is so fast. To create a website costs next to nothing. In the old world, if I self published this post it would cost me a fortune, and even then, there is no way it would be available to people in every corner of the world.

If BT and other service providers get their way, this will come to a sudden end. The BBC have big pockets and could afford to pay BT to ensure the iPlayer and it’s news reaches the world. The problem is, the average blogger doesn’t. So very quickly blogs will become like newspapers: very expensive to start with a huge risk. The internet will be no different to TV, with only those with big pockets able to get their content out.

3. The consumer always gets the bill

BT getting it’s way will ensure we all get cheap (or maybe even free) broadband. “Surely that’s better than £10/month?” I hear you say.

You only have to think for a second to see why this makes no sense. If I get broadband for free, someone has to be paying for it. In this case the BBC. So what do the BBC do to find the missing cash? Increase the License fee. Private companies will just bump up their prices or increase the number of adverts (which is only a short term solution as their is only so much money to be spent on adverts).

As I see it the argument is pretty clear and it doesn’t look good for the likes of BT. Hopefully the government will see things for what they are and legislate to stop them ever putting their plans in place.

The Guardian has today released the participation rates of students from lower class backgrounds at UK universities. The North East universities I’ve attended don’t fair particularly well (from my point of view). Durham has a shocking, though unsurprising, 2:3 ratio of private:state school students; compared to a national average of 1:10. Newcastle fairs slightly better but is still a way off the national average.

It’s also interesting to note that those with higher proportions of better off students have lower drop out rates.

It would be interesting to see the subject breakdowns for each uni; I suspect medicine comes near the bottom!

Bing seems to be a nice search engine from Microsoft but I couldn’t test it fully until I got rid of the over prominent adverts and added real-time twitter search through greasemonkey that I’ve become used to.

Turns out it was a pretty simple adaptation to the google greasemonkey script to make it work for bing. It does what it says on the tin really: Blocks the text ads and adds live twitter search.

Download Script (v 1.0)