Catchment areas are a joke and here's why

I picked up a copy of the Times this morning unaware of plans to end the catchment area arrangement that define which GP and/or surgery you can access dependant on your home address but I wish I had known about it yesterday.

Andy Burnham's announcement was particularly galling as I had spent half of yesterday trying to reason with my student’s only practice that I as a student might be allowed to continue to register there. I was chucked out five minutes later after being continually registered at the practice for 8 years.

The difficulty was that the surgery operates on the same catchment area principle as any other which is meant to limit over crowded patient lists in popular surgeries and/or in high population density areas of the country.But as a student practice, this surgery doesn't have a popularity issue or a population issue, the number of students attending various institutions in the area is known in advance and one cannot attend the surgery without prior academic registration. In terms of the surgery, it can offer a quick method of contacting your department or tutor if they wish to know about absences, exam attendances etc. It was and is a superb service and recognizes unusual illnesses predominant in young people (and saved my life once in doing so) and the risks of illness in cramped accommodation and lecture halls setting up flu jabs and various other services.

So why throw me out for living 500 yards outside their catchment area? They even knowingly made it harder to access other services where NHS Leeds take up patients on site in the surgery for other treatments. There is no such option in surgeries closer to my home address which the GP I saw yesterday acknowledged (just before I left). It’s not as though the area is very wide, my postcode has many students ineligible to attend the student practice living there as my new practice confirmed. (I went and registered yesterday as well.)

My home address is approximately 3 miles from uni. The student practice is 500 yards from the uni. Great if I'm ill when I'm in uni all day, yet there was no acknowledgement that the catchment area arrangement was about to end. They surely must have known there was consultation or plans to modernize it anyway. Had I known, I would have phrased my conversation with that GP completely differently.

While I try and fix the blog...

...here's another cut and paste job. A very good summary in the current edition of Total Politics on the Yorkshire ‘battleground’ seats. I don’t agree with every word, but it’s well argued. There are few Iain Dale fans here in a certain Leeds seat (see right), but the magazine is well balanced and has consistently interesting and quirky articles. Annoyingly.

http://www.totalpolitics.com/magazine_detail.php?id=589

Media storms blow though media land

Two in fact. It gives the poor dears something to write about.

And I f**king wrote about it then Blogger ate my post. No, I didn't back it up, so hopefully it can be retrieved.

Speaker unopposed -Times Online

Morning comrades...

Just to add to my previous post, a letter in the Times, written by Vernon Bogdanor, on the situation of the Speaker at a General Election.

Speaker unopposed -Times Online

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The politics of opportunity

Nigel Farage has today confirmed he's stepping down from his post as leader of UKIP to fight John Bercow's 18,000 vote majority in Buckingham. This is rich coming from someone who as leader (until today) was always the first jumping up and down in the media for British values or the British way of life, whatever that is, has decided to break British political convention on a whim. He will know full well the only way he can expect to overturn such a majority is hope the longstanding convention that the Speaker is returned in his or her seat with major party candidates not standing against them gives him a major advantage in picking up votes. It would still be an incredible result should he win, but he's clearly weighed up which seats he could win as a 4th party candidate (in England anyway).

Either, he doesn't see UKIP as a major political party, so hey, it's fine to ignore convention, which is unlikely as their own website bills them as Britain’s 4th party (just don't tell Alex Salmond). So logically, this convention is breakable if you just happen to be Nigel Farage and fancy your chances in Buckingham, or he has previously hidden a long standing disregard for British political convention which would be strange coming from someone who lead a party strongly linked with British history.

Which is it I wonder?

Lest we forget...

...this used to happen quite a bit on the news in the 1980's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m50rq6BgQg

A warning from history. Well, Canada.

I thought this was an interesting  politics piece from BBC online. It covers a R4 programme that went out this afternoon (Sunday) recounting the collapse of the governing party in Ottawa to only seats in the space of a single General Election. I worked in the Canadian Parliament a few years ago as an intern, so it was easier to understand the state of the parties and the politicians involved, but the comparison is clear for the UK Labour party. The Canadian parliament is bicameral, based on the UK system and the procedure and terminioogy are similar, making the comparison even more real to the listener.

The politics  page piece:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8226525.stm

The iplayer link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00m8p81/The_World_This_Weekend_30_08_2009/