Tosh, Nurses, Insurance Watchdogs, TV Ads, Cinema, Food?

 

Brown and Blue
Alan Michael Green (1932-2003)
Photo Credit: Senate House, University of London [CC BY-NC-SA]

Noora Sandgren is a visual artist and art educator. Her work is based on photography and its bendings, involving installation, texts and embodied practices.

In her artistic research she's interested in the inter - and intra-action of different materialities, their liveliness within shared space and time, marked by entangled ecological questions. Often working at her garden she collaborates with different agential powers, attuning to the processes of becoming-with.

('New Materialism & Sustainable Photographic Processes' by the London Alternative Photography Collective)

(Private Eye, No 1531, 2020)

Nurses

The Nurse
Joseph Johnston Lee (1876-1949)
Photo Credit: University of Dundee Fine Art Collections [ CC BY-NC-ND]

Twelve hour shifts, exhaustion and burnout are leading growing numbers of nurses to quit the NHS within three years of joining, research reveals.

Stress, lack of access to food and drink and the relentless demands of caring for patients are also key factors in the exodus, the King's Fund thinktank found.

... "Staff stress, absenteeism and turnover in the profession have reached alarmingly high levels," the thinktank concluded after investigating the working conditions faced by NHS nurses and midwives.

"This has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has laid bare and exacerbated longer term issues including chronic excessive workload, inadequate working conditions, staff burnout and inequalities, particularly among minority ethnic groups."

... "An urgent review is needed to investigate alternative shift patterns and look at mitigating the impact 12-hour shifts on staff wellbeing, care quality and safety."

There are 40,000 vacancies for nurses in England alone.

... The Royal College of Midwives welcomed the report. Its executive director for external relations, Jon Skewes, said: "We cannot expect stressed, exhausted and demoralised staff to continue delivering high levels of care. The RCM is calling for an early and significant pay rise for our midwives and their NHS colleagues. This government and the NHS have a duty of care to NHS staff, and they are failing to honour it."

An NHS spokesperson said: "There are now more than 300,000 nurses in England with over 13,000 nurses joining the NHS recently, and this year there was a 22% increase in applications for nursing degrees, all backed by a £28m fund to boost international recruitment."

(Denis Campbell, The Guardian, 2020)

For how many years have we known about this situation and that of  doctors in the UK?

*Earlier this week, the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell... noted that in Manchester alone there were more doctors from Sierra Leone than in Sierra Leone itself, where they had been trained.

But the nub of the issue is surely that the UK has benefited from the recruitment of foreign medical staff for far too long and especially from the importing of those who have been expensively trained in countries much poorer than ours. Mitchell acknowledged this when when he said that the first solution had to be to "grow more doctors and nurses here in the UK", and commended a recent increase in doctors' training places. The scale, the numbers and the sheer ambition, however, leave a huge amount to be desired.

I cannot recall how long I have been reading and writing about the UK's failure to train its own medical staff, from carers to nurses to specialist consultants - but it is decades. For all that time, the UK has been a parasite, and a hypocritical one at that... we have thousands upon thousands of vacancies but we just can't get the staff - so we will take them, nice and cheaply, from somewhere else.

It is true that, in part due to the efforts of Jeremy Hunt when he was health secretary, five new medical schools are in the pipeline - which is something...

(Mary Dejevsky, The i, 2020) 

Insurance Watchdogs

Time Rewarding  Industry and Punishing Sloth
unknown artist
Photo Credit: Margaret Lawless/Art UK [CC BY_NC]

Sometimes I wish I was a regulator. The work may be technical and boring but the pace of life looks very relaxed.

The latest evidence of the glacial speed at which our regulators conduct their affairs comes courtesy of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Yesterday it announced plans to act against insurers ripping off loyal customers by charging them more for car and home insurance than new customers. Wonderful news, you might think. Indeed it is for most people.

But why on earth has it taken the FCA two years to come to a conclusion that was blindingly obvious to anyone who has shown even a passing interest in insurance? It started this research in September 2018. Even then, it said it had been "concerned" about the issue for "some time". Quite what has been happening in the meanwhile?

Despite this long wait, don't expect anything amounting to real action anytime soon. The FCA's proposals now go to consultation until the end of January. The watchdog says it will then "consider all the feedback" and "intends" to publish a policy between April and June. So June 30 if we are lucky. But I fear the use of the word "intends" provides wriggle room for further delay. If any measures are in place before 2022 it'll be a triumph.

... Insurers should be ashamed of how they have exploited those least able to manage their affairs but so should the FCA for taking so long to sort it out... It has repeatedly allowed market failures or abuses that have terrible consequences for ordinary people to persist for years. And when it finally wakes from its slumber, it plods on like a sloth stuck in glue...

(Andrew Ellson, The Times, 2020)

What a wonderful image of a woefully slow organisation.

"And when it finally wakes from its slumber, it plods on like a sloth stuck in glue."

TV Ads

... I fell out of love with ads after an art lesson in middle school. Mr Coutts said something about them just being a way of getting us to buy things we didn't really want or need. He had a point. I never felt the same way about them again.

'Black Arrow' 
James Lynwood Palmer (1867/1868- 1941)
Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]

Now, watching them in the middle of a gritty Croatian spy drama, it's just painful. I've lost my immunity to their awfulness. During the three ad breaks I forced myself to sit through the other night, my toes were curling like those of the coppers in the Heineken commercial. There was one about how environmentally sound EDF (an energy supplier) is; a bloke hiding in a fridge handing a woman some cheese; and, worst of all, the ads for banks, which, interestingly, appear to have the most production money to spend. The Lloyds Bank advert featuring a black horse racing alongside delighted people to the sound of a Carpenters track made me want to tie my TV to the tail of a galloping horse so I could never watch anything of the sort ever again.

Breaking news: I've just spotted that if you give Channel 4 £50 a year, you don't have to watch the adverts. I'm in. 

(Adrian Chiles, The i, 2020)

A wise man, that Mr Coutts.

Cinema

Leicester Square, London at Night
unknown artist
Photo Credit: City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]

...In a good year I might make it to the cinema twice. The only millennials I know who go regularly are film buffs who really want to see a particular director's work on the big screen or those who never miss a Marvel film.

...The real problem is that my generation has too much technology and not enough human interaction. I already spend so much of my life staring at a computer at work, TV at home and my phone throughout the day that more screen time couldn't be less appealing, however big the screen. If I am catching up with friends or family I want to be able to talk to them. And on an app date? In a world of heavily filtered profile photos, bright lighting on a date is non-negotiable.

(Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, The Times, 2020)

Food?

The Coffee Bearer
John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

News arrives that we regularly mispronounce the names of various newly fashionable health foods, herbs and supplements, blithely mangling jojoba, shea and turmeric among others.

As someone who smugly reckoned himself bang on trend because he had heard of quinoa and called it kinoah until his kids told him it was keen-wah, I can't say I'm surprised.

There is a growing list of foods (or substances, or products, I'm not sure how to describe them) that my children (23 and 21) regard as perfectly normal sustenance, whereas I have to resort to Google whenever they are mentioned. Chia seeds from Mexico. Sriracha hot chilli sauce from Thailand. Matcha powdered green tea from China. Kombucha (I like to enrage my son by calling it Kampuchea) fermented tea from Manchuria. Kimchi pickled fermented vegetables from Korea. They are all lurking in our kitchen as I write.

It's not easy, this globalisation lark. I didn't encounter avocados, for instance, until I was well into my twenties. Not being able correctly to say the names of newly ubiquitous foodstuffs is the least of my worries. I'm still working out what they actually are.

(Robert Crampton, The Times, 2020

You didn't mention Kopi Luwak - a coffee that consists of partially digested coffee cherries which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. It is therefore, also known as civet coffee.