Leatherhead Matters

 What other reason can there be for the Scottish Parliament’s latest document intended to establish a Code of Practice on Cat Welfare?

The code includes sections on:

Protection from pain suffering illness & disease

Although the code promotes the practice of neutering & euthanasia

Choice for Cats

The cat should have a choice of living with other cats and animals or, not! (However, they do not specify which form the cat has to complete to exercise the choice).

Cats Need to be Able to Exhibit Normal Behaviour Patterns

Like using a plastic toilet tray and having regular pedicures!

Consider Their Health & Safety at Night

Meeow….can I go out with my friend Fluffy tonight?

You couldn’t make this up. Which idiot in the Scottish Parliament  decided citizens in Scotland needed this advice. Meanwhile the Scottish education system is going down the tubes, obesity is at record levels and the country is living off English tax payers.

You may have heard of the NHS Spine. It’s not an orthopaedic unit for back problems, it’s an IT project to put all patients records on a central data base. Given the Government’s abysmal record on personal data protection, one might think the Government & the NHS would be reconsidering this project. No, apparently not, it’s still full speed ahead and the NHS Spine web site is still proudly proclaiming  that the Spine project will “provide safer, more joined up care“.

Which all seems to ignore a number of incidents in which just about every hospital staff member rushes to a computer terminal every time a celebrity checks into hospital. Bureaucracies have a habit of downloading centrally stored data on to more easily managed local media. There have already been several instances of NHS Hospital Trusts such as, Hackney Primary Care Trust losing CDs (Hackney lost a CD containing the medical records of 160,000 patients).

Now it seems that the NHS Spine project is such a wonderful idea that the National Association of doctors in Germany are lobbying their Health Minister to abandon all centrally stored medical record projects.

Smartcards have been issued to 429,691 NHS staff as of January 1, 2008. The cards allow NHS staff to access our personal medical details on the NHS centralised data base. The number of users is eventually expected to top 1.2m! Under a recent Freedom of Information request NHS Trusts have already reported that 4,147 smart cards have been lost or 1% of the total. If this rate of loss is extrapolated to the eventual 1.2 m cards then we can expect a total of 12,000 cards to be lost before long. The cards are useless without a 6 figure PIN number but, apparently in many Trusts the PIN is not personalised….everyone gets the same PIN .

Read More at Privacy fear over NHS card loss