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Andy Cowper Profile picture
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6 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The vaccination programme is a great unifier.
It unites the worst and most stupid MPs in the Labour Party theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
with the worst and most stupid MPs in the Conservative Party
Bipartisan buffoonery is just what the country needs right now.

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More from @HPIAndyCowper

Andy Cowper Profile picture
7 Jan
Well. This is a thing from Alan.
“The case for the defence of the Health Department during 2020 is that we backed a lot of horses,. The majority of them came home. Some of them had hiccups along the way.
“But ultimately the right thing to do was not to worry about the political and reputational risk of not all these things working. In the public sector, all too often, the attitude is, if we don’t know it is going to work for sure, we shouldn’t do it because it might not work —
Read 25 tweets
Andy Cowper Profile picture
7 Jan
Isabel is once again, spot-on. What also emerged today (via @DavidProviders) is that the NHS capital/maintenance/estates backlog has risen over the past year from £6.5bn to £9bn.
If you put an approximate cost of £12bn (by the time there is capacity to get round to addressing the estates/maintenance work), and WLI of around £12-15bn (based on this health.org.uk/publications/l… plus the additional Covid backlog), then there’s some bracing NHS spending to be done
Oh, and then there is the longstanding NHS workforce crisis to fix. kingsfund.org.uk/publications/c… says £1bn a year, but the impact on current staff of the COVID-19 is very much not priced into this.
Read 5 tweets
Andy Cowper Profile picture
6 Jan
"As Matt Hancock told us this week, thanks to the wonders of science, 1.3 million people in the UK have now been vaccinated. Science is a field of endeavour previously closed to Britain by the EU, as he has pointed out many times.
"This is almost the same number of people who currently have the virus, which means we’ve vaccinated everyone. We’ve done it. And in record time.

But wait, not the same people, you say.
"Possibly, but it’s an unhelpful distinction only really of interest to public health experts, journalists and other known troublemakers.
Read 6 tweets
Andy Cowper Profile picture
19 Oct 20
The lack of performance delivery/enforcement clauses for the outsourcers’ and management consultants’ abysmal performance of their roles in the Test And Trace programme has been getting some new attention this week.
@HSJnews readers know that I wrote about these issues a month ago, linking to and quoting those contracts. hsj.co.uk/policy-and-reg…
This week, care minister Helen Whately explained in a written Parliamentary Answer that “contractual penalties are often unenforceable under English law so they were not included in test and trace contracts with Serco or Sitel”.
Read 5 tweets
Andy Cowper Profile picture
19 Oct 20
The Cummings-Johnson government is led by campaigners (Mr Dominic Cummings) and former journalists (Mr Boris Johnson and Mr Michael Gove): these are people whose career-fundamental belief is that you can “comms” big, real problems away.
.@HSJnews readers know that you cannot “comms” big, real problems away. They have watched past attempts to do that fail, often with disastrous consequences for patient safety and care quality.
The gulf between Mr Cummings’ lengthily-blogged ambition for a “data-and-delivery-driven” government and the ongoing lousy performance of Test And Trace prove that he is neither a serious person, nor one with the slightest clue of how to fix big, real problems.
Read 5 tweets
Andy Cowper Profile picture
19 Oct 20
Conservative peer, NHS Improvement chair and TAT leader the noble Baroness Harding of Winscombe gave the Sunday Times an interview, in which she laments that “everyone wants to believe that test and trace is a silver bullet. It has never been and it never will be”.
Life comes at you fast, eh?

Dido’s lament is a long way from M*tt H*nc*ck’s statement on 23 April that “This test, track and trace will be vital to stop a second peak of the virus”.

And an equally long way from the PM’s “world-beating” system promised five months ago in May.
Nor is it a reflection on why TAT’s performance in contact tracing is not just inadequate, but actually getting worse.

Baroness Harding adds, “wash your hands, wear a facemask. Keep your distance. That’s more of a silver bullet than anything Test And Trace can do”.
Read 5 tweets

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