Opinion – Shock toll of 5-minute care visits: Hundreds of thousands of elderly suffer ‘drive-bys’ as stretched councils tell staff not to waste time making conversation | Daily Mail Online – John Gelmini


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This article via Dr Alf starts from the false premise that the UK ever was a “caring society”.

I am old enough to remember countless elderly people being bullied into signing over their homes by their children and then being put into homes where they typically died within 3 years. My former neighbour’s elderly mother, an Irishwoman, was put into the old Fairfield Hospital in Arlesey, Bedfordshire, when I was a boy of 10. That hospital was originally a lunatic asylum built in Victorian Times. The old woman deteriorated, became depressed and then went mad and within 2 years was dead. My late mother and father were her only visitors before the body was taken by the local funeral director.

Today local authorities, with less than 32% worker productivity and wasteful working practices, continue to mismanage Adult Social Care and are now creating Ebay style auctions to lower care costs, which give rise to 15 minute and now 5 minute care visits.

People wishing to improve care quality really ought to do it themselves, as my sister and I did for my late father whilst working wherever possible and local authorities need to reduce in number to 15 for the whole of the UK with no districts, boroughs, City Councils, mid county councils and unitary authorities. Until I see this level of reform and cost cutting in local authorities, the Government should challenge this bogus narrative of “savage cuts”and take local authorities and the trades unions to task and impose meaningful reform on them.

John Gelmini

Opinion – Global Views of Economic Opportunity and Inequality | Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project – John Gelmini


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Dr Alf raises the conundrum of the age, namely how to create growth and jobs and a more equal society at the same time.

Germany and Norway seem to manage this, with gaps between those at the top and those on average pay being circa 12 to 1.

The gap in the UK between the overall pay of a Times 1000 CEO and a person on average pay(£27,000 gbp) is now 300 to 1, as pay for these CEOs is around £8.2 million gbp including bonuses and other “emoluments” which are paid regardless of whether the CEO in question has succeeded, over-performed, been sacked, failed miserably or been made to spend “more time with his or her family”.

The gap in America between Fortune 500 CEOs and ‘Joe Six-pack’ is up to 1000 to 1 and in both countries the gap is growing.

We need to look at the need for social cohesion and sensible tariffs on imports, rather than unfettered free-trade and at how we can create more export led businesses to replace non-jobs in the public sector and those displaced by robotics, automation, expert systems, ageist employers, cybernetics and 3D printing.

This will require up-skilling, language teaching via Pimsleur methods, the teaching of selling, social media marketing and NLP.

John Gelmini