You might think that the vaccination effort in the UK is a story about vaccines. It isn't. It's a story about primary care, administration, infrastructure and team work. Vaccination is one intervention that rests upon an almost infinite number of publically funded interactions
Getting vaccination to everyone is a very different thing to getting vaccination to everyone who turns up. That we can move quickly to vaccinate is not pinnacle of the NHS, it's a result of everything else the NHS is. The vaccination is a result made possible by everything else
I'm so fucking proud to be helping out making these vaccinations, even in a tiny way. I'm more proud to be part of a wider team and set of structures working together to get them to happen. I'm proud to be an unimportant person engaged in a profoundly important task
Vaccination isn't most complicated job NHS does. The support of our health and wellbeing from birth to our death is infinitely more complex. Without the structures created for that, vaccination would just be needles in haystacks. The NHS isn't one off things, it's the platform
The platform provided by the NHS and Local Authority public services is what makes the vaccination programme possible to execute. Any of us as volunteers can only be of use if that platform is solid and for as long as that platform has the resources it needs to function
It's easier to cover vaccination as a story because there's simple binary numbers. PPE (and many other health stories) are far harder to cover. Vaccination feels easy to understand. Yes, we can't vaccinate if we have no vaccine. But we can't 'health' without health resources
Health and social care may seem episodic, like getting dose of vaccine, but they aren't. It's not a series of one-off events. Our vaccination programme is possible because of continuity. Lots of industries can get people and resources together in one-off events. This is different
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One thing my early zoom fatigue makes me think is we should always listen to Disabled people first. Disabled people aren't outliers to whether something is usable. Disabled people are people with fewer options and/or energy to adapt to how something works: an early warning system
The zoom fatigue thing is a literal experiment in resilience. A service or interface that works well once but requires a long recovery time on part of user is not a service that works well. Instructive to see the rest of the world understanding what that means in practice
Grief hides in everyday things like a sweet in the pocket of your third best coat or jam on the knife you spread virgin butter with. Grief is like a cough, like the alarm you forgot you set, like the annual subscription to the app you used once. Grief hides in everyday things
Grieving is opening a letter to find another letter inside. Grieving is a performance forever rehearsed for an audience who never come. Grieving is sowing a garden with dead flowers in hope they'll grow again. Grieving is talking an inventory in knowledge the shop will close
Loss is carrying a piano up the stairs alone, finding the fuel to feed one heart where two once steadied the pressure, serving tennis balls to the back of an empty dusty court. Loss is knowing the thing you need to feel fully is the thing that the loss is about.
Some of you will probably know I'm currently grieving. It's a month since my fantastic sister died. I've been thinking a lot about loss, progress and reckoning and coming to terms, both personally and as a society. And I've been wondering: how will we remember the pandemic dead?
The UK is filled with memorials to the dead of wars, of disasters, of lifeboat crews and atrocities. We are a landscape haunted by attempts to remember the brave and the innocent. Villages, towns, businesses, communities: all grouped together to pay for plaques, statues, gardens
I have a terror that in our desire to get 'back to normal' we will forget those lost and things lost during the current pandemic. There's not an enemy they were overcome by; not a single flashpoint of tragedy. Those lost to the pandemic are an uncomfortable reminder of failure
Just doing a bit of reading, the talk of NHS reorganisation having whetted my appetite for a bit of health geekery. I'm mainly trying to get my head around the purchaser provider split in NHS and what that means. Here's @mellojonny from 2011 (Pre Lansley) abetternhs.net/2011/01/18/com…
This by Mick Timmins is great "choice and competition in health seem to work best when there is a growing rather than a shrinking market – and, despite its relative protection, health has been a shrinking market since 2010" kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2017/06/c…
Thinking about health and social care integration. Some people think you need reorganisation to remove silos. But, thing is, people like silos. And things not working in partnership often result from one partner not wanting to, or being in a position to do, what the other wants
I think reorganisation of health and social care always tilts toward 'reorganisation of social care so the NHS works better' and very seldom 'reorganisation of NHS so social care works better'. Social care isn't just an element of local authority work that enables the NHS
I kepp thinking of the grand utopian dream of end-to-end health and social care, all together under one notional organisational roof like Toys R Us and thinking: it is a utopian dream and it's also one that people didn't really like the closer it was to reality
Actually, one thing I have been doing during lockdown is really indulging in 'this looks like that' & 'that sounds like this'. What I mean is kind of grazing and burrowing into visual or auditory things. Exploring without going anywhere by jumping from book to book, song to song
Really, consciously tickling my visual and auditory palate by finding things that feel new or which belong with each other by theme, production, sound or, I dunno, shared feeling of jouissance. An example: old pre-internet photobooks on niche subjects with that kodachrome hue
It's like really spending enough time in a landscape that you can see the history of the topography, uncover the old paths, see what links things that otherwise seem unconnected. Seeing the contour lines of culture and human ideas between previously singular seeming things