Cyclizine

Someone used my card to buy a load of online shopping at Asda. But because it was the first time I'd 'shopped' at Asda I got 10% cash back and made nearly £30 after the bank refunded me the rest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_o'_nine_tails Isn't Captain's Daughter another name for this?

Piper Alpha was the day my youngest sister was born. I don't really remember the news, but apparently my uncle had been on it but had flown off a day or so before and was sleeping off a hangover somewhere in Aberdeen - not that my dad and grandparents knew whilst franticly trying to track him down.

Here we go...

I think the current 12 team system works pretty well. The only other system would be to reduce the Premiership to 10 teams and play x4 like the rest of the SPFL divisions, but I can't see that happening. I think the while "fans are bored with playing the same clubs" is a red herring. I don't really care who we're playing, just want the 3 points (as rare as that is...) Small divisions keep things tighter whereas 18 or 20 tab divisions become stale mid-season once top and bottom are pretty much decided.

It's a reflection on the lack of GPs in general though. There are few GPs available to work out of hours shifts and so these shifts attract a premium. They're antisocial hours and given the daytime workload of GPs it's not surprising that there are few willing to do it. I agree that we should be attempting to make use of allied health professionals, but it must be in a way that is both cost effective and safe. There is about to be a mass retirement of GPs across the board, things could get interesting.

It's not really, you start on a band at the first point depending on what your job is. So a S/N might be 5, BMS 6 etc and then you progress through the points annually. General practice is different as unless the practice is run by the health board, GPs employ their own staff.

I've already linked to this. There's no such thing as Clinical/Non-clinical payscales. Everyone apart from doctors and dentists are on AFC payscales. It's not difficult.

I don't see why you think it's so complex, it's just a common set of payscales. Surely that's easier than several hundred thousand individual negotiated contracts?

He's right though. The folk who are least likely to turn up are those living hand-to-mouth or with chaotic lifestyles. You penalise them and it'll either be ignored or you tip them into another crisis and you get a more expensive emergency admission.

I don't actually work in Inverness (haven't for a while) I actually work in one of our brand spanking big city centres of excellence (haha), so yes, I do know how it works. Also, the Highlands has one of the highest proportions of 'out-of-area' admissions (i.e. a lot of tourists) of all hospitals in Scotland... There are longer opening hours already, as you've been told - there isn't the uptake. The changing demographic is to the older, retired population. Right... I've already pointed out what hours my partner works. Would you like to hazard a guess at what the other five GPs in her practice work? It's the same. Unless you want to cut the number of appointments during the day, which, as has been pointed out, are the ones in demand, not evening and weekend ones, how do you suggest your plan gets off the ground? You haven't read the report correctly. Mortality is actually higher if you're admitted on a Tuesday (it's not statistically significant) but, anyway. The reason that mortality appears higher for weekend admissions is because they are emergency admissions. During the week, you also have elective admissions as well as emergency admissions. Almost by definition, emergency admissions are sicker than elective admissions and are more likely to die. So, if all your admission are emergencies then... you will have a higher proportional mortality than if you have both elective and emergency admissions.

I agree totally that drugs should be funded based on their benefits - this is why we have the SMC (and NICE down south). I know how much paracetamol costs thanks, my hospital pharmacy nicely tell us how much each drug costs (and in my line of work I administer a lot of drugs). Paracetamol is less than 2p/tablet. IV preparation is about £1.50. I know that health tourists are not really an issue because I work in a acute specialty. I can't remember the last non-entitled person who was abusing the service. Reasonable number of tourists (their notes get special stickers and we have a manager who chases their insurance), and, yes, we have a lot of Eastern Europeans, particularly in the Maty, but that's because, shock horror, immigrants are usually young. They're not abusing the service, they live and work here and are entitled to use it! Out of hours, we have less staff, because we do less. Out of hours we deal with urgent and emergency care. We don't do routine elective stuff. There's good reason for this, not least because people don't want their tonsils out at 3am... We staff (medically anyway) safely out of hours. I'm aware that my nursing colleagues do have worse staffing issues. However, your point that you have worse outcomes at these times has been comprehensively shown to be false. Even Jeremy Hunt has stopped banging on about it because he can't back his statements up. The vast majority of GP appointments are for young children and the elderly, patients who can be seen during the normal working day. You obviously have no idea what a GP's day involves if you're suggesting 0800-1600 and 1000 to 1800! My other half works officially 0800-1800 Mon-Fri. Her surgeries are four hours long with 5 appointments per hour: 0800-1200 and 1400-1800. During her 2 hour 'lunchbreak' as I suppose you'd call it she has to do 3-5 home visits, write referral letters, deal with correspondence, review results, oh, and have lunch. Her surgery run an early morning 0700 start surgery and a late 2000 finish surgery each week. They never fill the appointments. There is no real demand for routine appointments outside 0800-1800 and shifting staff to these hours just means that there are less to deal with the majority of patients. Regarding charging for appointments, there's a balance between how much it costs to administer the system and how much you'd save, equally with free prescriptions.The majority of prescriptions collected are for people who wouldn't have paid anyway under the old system i.e. children, pregnant women, elderly, chronic conditions. It's over 90% in England. I'm not against this, I just don't think the evidence is there for it.

But my point still stands; if you're personally spending £x on health, it's still £x whether it's all from taxation or from various sources. Unless you're advocating different tiers of health provision dependent on how you as an individual choose to fund your combination of funding streams - now that's a different argument. Yes, as an individual it may be cheaper, so long as you stay in good health and avoid any accidents. However on a population level, spreading risk is cheaper.

But does it really matter if you're spending £x / year on health insurance or being taxed £x / year into the health budget? You're still £x down. If you want an insurance system, then how do you want it to run? Can the insurance companies exclude pre-existing conditions? Can they refuse to renew your cover? Can they increase your premium if you develop a new and interesting disease? Because if they can't, then the premiums will be extortionate and if they can, then just pray it doesn't happen to you. On the other hand, a population based model, where the risk is spread across everyone, I think is fairest. Yes, you could do this through 'insurance' but it's just as easy to lop it off as taxation.

For once, I do agree with some of what you say, however... Where would you like us to get our drugs from? To be honest, the majority of drugs used are old and generic and therefore fairly cheap. Drug development is an expensive business. I'm not one for pretending drug companies are nice, fuzzy, friendly companies, but they're not charities either. They get 15 years exclusivity on new drugs. It's a total drop in the ocean - a useful deflection for the real issue of underfunded health and social care: "blame the immigrants". I don't have Scottish figures, but England 'health tourist' cost was ~£200m in 2015 (approximately ~£75m was ex-pats coming back!). England's health budget is £116 billion, so <0.2% of the budget. What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean I wasn't actually supposed to be working nights over Hogmanay? Hospitals are and have always been open all the time for emergency care. The deliberate muddying of waters by conflating emergency and elective care was part of Hunt's strategy against the junior doctors. Eh? You mean 0800-0000 or 0600-2200 all week? Or 24h Mon-Fri? I'm not sure what you'd expect this to achieve other than more burnt out GPs. There's the slight issue of where do these GPs come from as well... And since you brought up pay... it's not as if it's a secret: Doctors and dentists and all other NHS staff.

Did you just say that the UK imports wool, lamb, meat and dairy from NZ (an independent country of ~5m people); but rUK would not import from an independent Scotland (a country of ~5m people) because it has enough wool, lamb, meat and dairy?

As Ad Lib has said, it is important to distinguish between which home nation you are talking about when you mention the NHS. Health has been devolved in Scotland and NI since the dawn of the NHS in 1948. Wales only since 1999 It is interesting to see how the different systems have diverged over time. England went down the lines of separation of primary and secondary care, with primary care stakeholders - initially trusts, but now basically GPs (the cynical would say to deflect criticism on...). These stakeholders purchase services from providers (public or private). Given that this is a public funded service, I think many would feel that bringing in a fake market is a bit pointless, as public hospitals compete for patients. The idea was to introduce patient choice, but in the grand scheme of things, I think most folk would want to go to their nearest hospital. In Scotland, there is no primary/secondary care split. All services are run by the regional health boards (Grampian, GGC, Forth Valley, etc) in different areas. I'm not sure how a private service would work in a nation like Scotland; the Central Belt would probably be okay, but further north and south I can't see how it would be profitable given the small populations. Taken to the extreme, it would probably involve services disappearing from the islands and rural areas and people having to travel even more than they do at the moment.

People turning up to Emergency Departments with non-urgent "GP" problems are not really the issue. They either get told to see their GP at triage or they can sit in the waiting room and take five or ten minutes to be dealt with several hours later. The issue is chronic underfunding of social care and closure of inpatient beds for non-existent "Community Care". Different budgets, you see, and social care is funded by... local councils, who've born the brunt of austerity and slashed social care funding. When we have an increasingly frail and co-morbid population, with significant and complex disease the hospitals are going to fill up. Once hospital beds are full, where are these patients in the ED going to go? They wait for someone to be discharged (either home or vertically). This seven day a week GP opening would be lovely, but for several issues: we don't have enough GPs to run a five day service this has been piloted before; evening and weekend routine appointments are not in demand there isn't any evidence that this will stop people attending the ED (which isn't the issue, anyway) The bizarre way the NHS is run in England seems to have exacerbated the problem there. We have been insulated more in Scotland, but the cracks are beginning to appear.

It also helps to pat the seat next to you whilst maintaining eye contact with them, to ensure keeping the seat free.

I've also noticed this problem with apps - it seems to be ones installed on the external SD card. I did get a warning about the one I stuck in being too slow. Have ordered a new one so will see if it makes a difference. Other problem I noticed but have now solved was apps resetting themselves. Most annoying being Nova launcher which I've always used for the notification icons. It seems that apps automatically get killed when the phone sleeps but you can change this in the settings under badgering task clear and set which ones you don't want killed.

I work in NHS Scotland in a clinical role. It's fair to say things have got worse over the last few years. However, the main cause of this is a lack of staff and an increase in workload. This is not just a Scottish problem, but UK wide - although it is certainly worse up here. Causes? Aging population, who are living longer. Complex patients with multiple health problems. Lack of community and family care for the frail elderly. Increase in medical technology and our ability to intervene. Poor workforce planning over many years. It isn't all doom and gloom. Morale seems better up here, community/hospital relationships seem better. I think generally, the NHS here is genuinely something to be proud of.

I got an Umi Super a couple of weeks ago for ~£160. Have to be honest, it's a cracking bit of kit. Have to charge it probably twice in three days, but I've been hammering it with video and music. Pleasing lack of crapware on it as well. In Aberdeen at the moment, so 4G all over, which is top notch.

If the medical students in England were fully subsidised, then maybe you'd have a point. However, if they're paying upwards of £50,000 to study for 5-6 years I think your argument suffers. This £250,000 figure to train a doctor is utter bollocks. Hospitals receive cash for student placements. Someone has just added up the total cash and divided it by the number of students. Remember, this figure will include salaries of university staff who hold an honorary NHS contract - you could argue that's saving the hospital money... It also belittles the fact that medical students and junior doctors are not just learning, they are providing service to the NHS. In fact, this applies to all allied health students.

A lot of Highland League clubs go in for this too...

Definitely Clach...