Data protection

The hospital trust where I will be working from August has just sent me the reams of paperwork I am required to fill in to demonstrate that I am safe and qualified to do the job. It contains exactly the same questions, and requests all the same paperwork, that I sent in about 12 months ago to demonstrate that I was safe and qualified to do the job this year. Hundreds of people are being paid by the taxpayer to do this.

Best of all, though, was the document on patient confidentiality, which was a mixture of bland statements of the obvious, stern caveats about talking to the media ever, and a wonderful section on "Use of Internal and External Post" which appears to have been written by someone at the department of health purely to remind us of all the ways in which imbecile government officials have sent the personal details of thirty thousand drivers to some organisation in Texas, or left 120 patients' medical records on a train, etc.

I should say at this point that the Trust I'm working for is one I have enormous respect for, and which has not to my knowledge made any such crass fuckups. But again, someone in government has spent time and money writing this patronising nonsense when if I spent my entire career wilfully distributing patients' personal information to as many people as I possibly could, I still wouldn't get near the breaches in confidentiality that a single civil servant can manage after one too many bottles of claret with lunch.

Snake ateronon

I want to know who these unspecified "scientists" are who are besmirching the name of their profession by claiming that some wonder-pill can "stave off" heart disease and stroke? Because whether the drug works or not is so far from being proven I can't begin to explain - but suffice to say that so far as I can make out these snake-oil salesmen have precisely one study of 150 people in which they measured not heart disease or stroke, but instead "the oxidation of harmful fats in the blood".

So a more accurate description of this pill would be something like:
"A new pill is being hawked around to fat, worried people everywhere by a private company looking to make a quick buck. They have demonstrated that it reduces one blood test result at one point in time in a laughably small sample, and are hoping you will pay thirty-five pounds a month just in case it thereby prevents illnesses they haven't demonstrated any reduction in. For thirty-five pounds a month you could buy just under 20kgs of tomatoes at ASDA, or just over 10kgs of organic cherry tomatoes at Tesco. Every month. That way, you'd get lunch as well as the health benefits."

Newsflash, boys and girls: eat sensibly, exercise more, see a doctor if you're worried. Don't buy this crap until and unless someone has proven it'll help you. So far, they're nowhere near.