Is this the new NHS or has it been this way for a while?

My father is about to have a hip replacement. It's the last of his natural major joints below the waist, so we joke that he is the bionic man. To be fair though he is 82, has type 2 diabetes and has become increasingly frail. The hip replacement will hopefully have a genuinely radical effect on his life, at the minute he is almost housebound as his pain is intense.

At his pre-operative assessment he went through the usual procedures, blood tests etc, but one aspect of his pre-operative assessment really stood out. While seeing the occupational therapist he was told, in what seemed very much like a pre-prepared statement:

"When you are on the ward you will be expected to care for yourself. You are not sick, you are well, and you have elected to have this surgery, so the nursing staff are not going to run around after you. If a situation arises where you feel you cannot do something for yourself you must press the call button and a nurse will come and assess the situation."

Now I used to work in the NHS, and I still do in an honorary role at two hospitals, and I haven't heard this before. Is it common practice? Is it just the opinion of one rogue member of staff?  I understand that there are pressures on ward staff, and I understand that some, maybe most, elective cases can self-care but my father is clearly frail. He is unstable on his feet, has lost weight in the past year, has several chronic health conditions and is not able to fully self-care (he hasn't been able to touch his feet for several years, since his knee replacement surgery). Surely a statement of this type should be made on a case by case basis, with those who are able being told that self-care is the rule. But for those who are clearly frail, surely a separate approach should be taken, one that highlights admissions as requiring more care. We used to call this care planning, and I assume something of this form still happens on admission. 

At a time when the NHS is facing accusations of a lack of compassion is this really the message hospital staff should be putting across?

A new start for 2012

Give me a child till he is seven and I'll show you the man. Other than sounding ludicrously paedophilic this statement tells us all we need to know about religion; it is fostered by parental indoctrination and not by a quest for enlightenment. I had an idea over Christmas, whilst listening to 'Little Drummer Boy'. Why not, from 2012, instead of teaching our children to be 'Christian', 'Muslim', 'Hindu' etc teach them to be 'loving', 'accepting' and 'humanistic'. Instead of parents channeling their efforts into ensuring their children 'support the right holy team' why not just try to teach children to embrace life in every form, to care for the environment, to look after old people, to give to the poor. Would the world be a worse place if we did this? - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Never be rude to a scientist, no matter what you do...

Never trust a scientist, and that includes me.


I've become increasingly pissed off by the industry I work in, an industry where people who lie and cheat do well, get jobs, build careers while some who are honest and have integrity get anally raped by their employers and told that they should 'probably go and do something else for a career'. People far better than me are in danger of being thrown out of science because they don't 'make money'. 


This is why, and this is how it works...


Scientists need money to do experiments (as chemicals, equipment, cells, animals, lab coats and cocaine all cost money). This money can come directly from Universities, from charities or from the Government (channelled through organisations known as 'Research Councils'). You can also get money from  Europe but only if you have some European mates, some friendly companies and lots of time.


In order to get this money you have to write a grant application, and to increase the chances of your application being successful you have to show that you have pretty much already done all the work and just need to confirm a few things and finish off a few loose ends. Do you see where the system falls down there? A good idea won't get funded unless you've pretty much already done it, and in order to do it you need to be funded...


The best way to write a successful funding application is to have already published your 'preliminary' work in a scientific journal. This publication will have been checked by independent scientists (peer reviewed) to make sure it is of the required quality. Of course they don't see raw data, you just send them graphs you make on the computer. Graphs that you can make say whatever you want. So, not a good system really... 


So this gives scientists a quandary. In order to be successful you can either


a) be honest (and lucky) and see if you can scrimp around and get enough data to get some papers and preliminary data which you can use to 'sex up' your application.


or  


b) Make a load of data up that looks impressive and pretend that you're a really good scientist (after all, not many people are going to ever check to see if you've done the work are they?). This way your application looks amazing, and you're more likely to get the money.


The latest estimates are that about 70% of published science has at least one fabricated or embellished piece of data in it. So basically put, most science is bad.


Now imagine (it's not hard to) that in this economic climate, which has hit Universities as hard as anyone, your employer is putting pressure on you to get money in (and to get high impact papers). If you don't, you're out. End of your job, and possibly career. No money for the mortgage, fuel or food. Would you not be slightly, just slightly tempted to think 'If I make up some data, and get it published, I have a better chance of getting a good paper out and then some money in'. I would be. So far I haven't come under that pressure but i don't know how I would react if I was. 


The thing is I've seen people who have been in this position, and far worse I've seen people doing 'bad science' even when they're not under pressure. This has ranged from doing one experiment, liking the result and saying that you repeated it 5 times to check the result (which would make it statistically significant, an essential part of any scientific experiment) to completely and utterly fabricating a result to give you a graph that supports the hypothesis you want. I have sat in meetings where a junior scientist has been told to 'say we did it 5 times' when he had done his experiment once (or possibly made it up)  and I have seen people get papers from blood samples that do not exist (from which they haven't even tested the stats correctly for multiple comparisons #geektalk).


And who, in all of this, has the better career? So far I have been honest, I haven't made up data, I haven't cheated. And my career is going OK, but not spectacularly. I'm not under immediate threat but things will get interesting at the end of my contract. But people I used to work with are doing better than me, getting more papers, better papers when I know they are cheating. In an interview situation, they would blow me out of the water.


It fucking stinks. It hurts. Never trust a scientist. 

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

It's my first blog, be gentle... I tried to make it funny, realised that was way beyond me so took out all the wit and pith. Well, there's some pith.

I love my job. Genuinely, adore it. Not just because I can spend the day at home in my PJ's at no notice, or because I occasionally get to go to really nice places on conferences. I love it because I love science. I am a geek.

There is a problem however. And if I'm going to spend the rest of my career at a middling provincial University, this problem is not going away.

The students.

I generally don't like students (not a great thing to admit for an educator). In fact, there are subtypes of student (those with deliberately weird facial hair, those that wear beanie hats in the summer and those that play frisbee indoors) that I would like to see tortured. But if the students I have direct contact with work hard then I can forgive them their studentness. In the past I would have added even if they're a bit thick. But that's changing...

My latest two students (3rd year Applied Biology students) are killing my head. One of them doesn't speak, the other one does a remarkable impression of rain man. Every utterance she makes hurts my brain. These are some of her classics..

When being told to meet me in room 10 and actually going to room 12: "This one has a 2 in it"

When asked if she had timed an experiment: "I noted the time we started. But I forgot it"

When asked if she'd seen a very basic molecular biology technique: "Yeah, you know those things when you go to a University and look around. I think I saw it there"

I could go on but there is no cathartic release in retelling this, in fact it makes me feel rage.

Who is to blame for someone getting to the end of her degree and still not being able to follow simple commands or understand the difference between a 10 and a 12?

Probably me if the VC has anything to say about it...

The Colonel