Leatherhead Matters

Hammersmith and Fulham PCT has piloted the use of text messaging to tackle obesity.

It intends to use the scheme across its 26 surgeries from this month.

The west London PCT sent out text messages to almost 1000 patients over the Christmas period, using the iPlato Patient Care Messaging software. It asked them to help update records by texting their weight and height measurements. The surgery then use the data to calculate BMI scores and contact patients about their weight classification.

A text message is sent to each participating patient, after the assessment, which simply says either “No Prob” or, “Fatty“!

Read what they actually do here: E-Health Insider Primary Care

T he Government has been progressively lowering the real price of alcohol, while increasing the number of places where we can purchase it round the clock. Tony & Gordon were going to turn Britain into a modern, continental style, cafe society.

What a surprise it must have been to see the consequence. A huge growth in alcohol consumption and the police fighting a losing battle to contain drunken violence on our streets. But, now the Government is cleaning up its act. You see its all about personal choice & responsibility. Now all you have to do  is to complete the online NHS alcohol assessment. The personal feedback will surely suppress your consumption and hey! …….another societal problem solved via modern technology. Oh Dear!

As George Bush’s Special Envoy top the Middle East, Tony Blair has been working tirelessly on a secret road map for peace in the Region. Following a tip off from Gordon Brown we are able to exclusively reveal the map which TB has developed:

A Company called ST16 just won the New York Film Festival’s International Gold Award for a “viral film” called Steamy Windows (previously titled Hot Girl Sex In Car until YouTube filtered it as” inappropriate content”). In just six months, the film attracted over 2.4m viewers on YouTube. “The film was rated 85th most viewed of all time by UK Youtube,” the release exclaimed. “Approximately 10,000 young people from Lancashire voluntarily watched the clip. This is approximately 10 per cent of the target audience.”

So who is peddling this filth to our nation’s youth? Well, what a surprise its that nice Scottish Presbyterian in Downing St, Gordon Brown.

You see he’s developed a whole new political movement where everything is not as it seems. He prepares the country for a 2007 election and then tells us that cancelling was nothing to do with unfavourable  opinion polls. He tells us that he wants “British Jobs for British Workers” whereas 80% of the jobs go to non British people. He tells us that he is prudent and will not play games with the British economy, though we now have unsustainable levels of government debt. I could go on but, you get the picture.

The video is totally consistent with this philosophy so, rather than tackle rampant binge drinking on our streets with sensible policies, he sends out a viral video, clearly tagged as containing sex! All those horny, alcohol fuelled NEETS (Not in Eduction, Employment or, Training) find the video on YouTube  and then become cynical about politics because, its actually a “Don’t Drink & Drive” video!

1. Liberalised sales (allowing 24 hour petrol stations & supermarkets to sell alcohol)
2. Allowed the price of alcohol to decline in real terms.
3. Showed 100% tolerance of alcohol drinking on our streets.

Broadband advertising certainly doesn’t appear to meet Advertising Standards. There are 3 main requirements of broadband, Speed, Continuity/Reliability and Price.

Broadband speed is advertised as “upto……megabytes/second”. However this maximum speed is only ever reached in a Leap year, on New Year’s Eve, when everyone else is switched off! There appears to be no way of indicating actual speeds because it is determined by so many variables (distance from your local switch/exchange, number of users between you and the switch, whether those users just happen to be downloading videos etc).

Just like the telephone, electricity and cable TV we want broadband service to be 99.99% reliable, always available and if it’s not available we need customer oriented service to resolve the problem.

I’ve been with BT Broadband for several years, in fact so long, I am out of contract but, still paying a premium price. I probably average around 2.0 - 2.2 mbs but, reliability has been appalling over the last 6 months with constant loss of service. The BT Call Centre in India has been polite but totally ineffective in improving the service. Speed & reliability are important to me and I am willing to pay a modest premium for it.  However, there’s the problem…BT own most of the UK network so I may have the same service problems with other suppliers and there is a total lack of transparency within the industry on speed. Consequently, switching is a lottery and exacerbated by the contract period lock in.

I think I’m stuffed!

The headline is a great quote in THIS article in the Times.