Checklists in surgery should be mandated given the extraordinary error improvements they bring. The interesting question is where else checklist thinking can be used.
Archive for the 'Government' Category
There’s a valid point made in this article regarding the benefits H&S has given us. The difficulty for me is that the tolerated levels of risk seem far too low as currently practised.
Hmm. The list of signatories to this Early Day Motion praising homeopathy might be a good reason not to vote for my local MP in the soon-to-be-announced election. His voting record against the government is pretty strong, so maybe he’s a stealth Tory after all?
It looks like it doesn’t matter which account you use to pay self-assessment. It shouldn’t, given that the unique taxpayer reference (UTR) is unique… So why doesn’t HRMC tell you this? A minor #fail.
I like this idea of taking people aside and have them think through issues in depth. I doubt we’ll have the same level of input into this year’s general election.
In the light of the discussions on addressing the substantial number of deaths directly attributable to drink, it is refreshing (boom boom) to find a source of reasoned analysis of the effects of campaigns on drink and drugs (one of which suggests that a five-year US programme might have increased drug taking in youths).
There was me loving the re-photoshopped Cameron poster but wondering where the equivalent piss-taking would on similar Labour missteps. And then Jonny tweeted this. “Smellderly” had me snorting my coffee.
“Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty”: is a slightly pessimistic look at the good work that has been done on levels of child and pensioner poverty. However, the lesson that universal benefits redistribute more to the poorest than targeted ones is important: surely they are easier to administer as well as easier to explain?
The concern must be that the impending onset of chronic diseases will spread faster in poverty than outside.
The Mash’s take on broken Britain is fabulous: “most children now raised by goats“.
Surowiecki has a couple of articles looking at banking and debt. He wonders if the crisis has meant that banks have become bigger, or at least the ones that we feel comfortable using.
Seperately, he suggests (and I think rightly) that we are predisposed to use debt (both companies and individuals), so having government policies that push us further in that direction isn’t particularly helpful.
In both cases, additional regulation would make sense, but in a counterintuitive sense: we should regulate to be agnostic as to, e.g., debt and equity, big banks and small. That way we can let an ecosystem grow, rather than try to drive evolution down a path we think we understand.