There is no real crisis worthy of the name in our Scottish NHS. It is largely a bonfire of mass hysteria originating in media misreading or distortion of statistics, fuelled by public servants and trades union leaders with a vested interest in starting the fire and danced around by politicians who hope to benefit from the aftermath at the expense of their rivals in this 21^st Century tribal community. If ‘mass hysteria’ offends your sensibilities, you can use the more gentile term ‘cultural performance’ but the point is the same in that the human behaviour being described is essentially ritualistic rather than rational.

I know and regret that people have died needlessly and others are waiting longer than is often bearable for them. NHS Scotland is not perfect but it’s a damn sight better than virtually any other public health service on the planet. The demand for more and better service is insatiable. No service feasible or affordable could ever meet all of the demands that a modern population might expect of it. No one ever feels 100% fit. If they thought there was treatment for it, no matter how trivial others might think the complaint was, people in this affluent caring society would expect it and now. The evidence is clear and present. I keep posting this. I know it’s getting dated after only a few months. I know some of the evidence might be open to argument but, taken together and accepting the limits of all statistics, it suggests a national health service of incomparable quality and in rude good health:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/10/28/nhs-scotland-bucking-the-uk-trend-despite-media-attacks/

Take just one example:

‘Scotland has the best and still improving A&E performance in the World’

Those are the words of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine this year. There are many other objective indicators of high quality in NHS Scotland yet our media insist on acting as if it were not so:

‘Outrage after Scottish NHS misses targets in over two thirds of Government standards’

The Daily Record shouts the above as it too dances round the bonfire of mass hysteria without ever telling us how high the targets are, how narrow the misses were and how proud we should be that we have such a system managed by such a government that is prepared to set them and to use them to help it improve even further. What kind of culture rewards high aspirations with such derision? These are achievement NHS England could only dream of and which for most of the planet would only be a crazy wonderful dream. Imagine the situation were the other political parties to return to rule? They’re even less confidence-inspiring now than they were when they were doing their best to destroy it all via privatisation only a decade ago.

Let me show how mass hysteria can be a fact of life in modern Scotland just as easily it can be in pacific island tribal communities. I stole the impressive headline from a great Scottish academic, Ian Stronach, who wrote ‘Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire’ about the endless panics and ritualistic cycles of change in school-level education in response to international evidence that other country’s children (Germany, Japan etc) were doing better at something (Literacy, Numeracy especially) than ours. Opposition politicians responded opportunistically to this very limited evidence of what was at most a challenge and with the help of the media turned it into a ‘crisis’ which was then presented to the wider population in terms which trigger a further panic and crucially encouraged a few disgruntled parents to come forward and to report excitably on how a school had failed their child. The media also sought out a few disgruntled employers to support the notion that job applicants could not spell or count properly. Before you knew it, the flames were roaring and the government of the day was forced into a new programme of reform. Extra staffing, resources and the excitement generated among the children ‘getting’ the ‘new’ education lead to some improvement, at first. As time passed, however, the novelty factor wore off for the kids and for the teachers and the extra funds began to fade away. A few years later and nothing much had changed. Five to ten years later and some new international comparative research reported that our kids were failing again, relatively. Media reported it, some opposition politicians spotted the career opportunities and we were off again. Teachers groaned, ‘Not again FFS!’  Any readers who have worked in Scottish schools over the last 40 years or less will have seen this before, perhaps more than once, and know just how much this is really a ‘cultural performance’ to satisfy the hysterical reactions of a new generation of parents and politicians. Crucially, these new parents and politicians had forgotten the previous cycle of ritualistic behaviour. In particular, if you were a teacher, you might remember the dances of those close to the tribe’s chief, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools’ as they came to your school, fully-feathered and carrying sharp sticks to prod you into making the decreed changes. Anecdotally, allegedly, those same scary individuals drove Stronach out of Scotland to work somewhere more modern like, I think, Manchester! I can’t find the source for this but I’m sure I’ve read of an American Educational Psychologist (Ralph Tyler?), speaking in the 1940s and saying of a new curriculum strategy then: ‘Oh no, not those fucking competences again!?’

Here’s how Professor Stronach himself, put it in the abstract to the full paper (url below) which I really recommend:

‘This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as ‘cultural performances’, and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms – as league tables – are a form of contemporary ‘spectacle’. They are our Olympic Games.’

Are we agreed then you can have mass hysteria or a cultural performance with no really scientific basis in modern Scotland? If it is possible in one system such as Education, then why is it not likely in another of a similar nature in the same society, in Health Care? Next time you’re watching Ruth Davidson shouting ‘Scandal!’ at the First Minister, imagine feathers, a skimpy animal skin, face-paint and a sharp stick. See what I mean?

 Footnotes:

1. ‘Shouting fire in a crowded theater’is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The paraphrasing does not generally include (but does usually imply) the word “falsely”, i.e., “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater
2. ‘Insociology and psychology, mass hysteria (also known as collective hysteria, group hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior) is a phenomenon that transmits collective allusions of threats etc., whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear (memory acknowledgment).’

Other source:

Stronach: Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire: ‘Educational Effectiveness’ as Cultural Performance http://evi.sagepub.com/content/5/2/173.short

 

On more than a few occasions, I’ve thanked BBC Salford at 6pm for telling us about the endless crises in ‘Hard Tory England’ before BBC Scotland come on tell us how bad things are here without even a sniff of comparison or context. If you were only to switch on at 6:30pm you might never know of the repeated strikes by junior doctors, the regular and massive failures of mental health boards, the collapse of respect for police forces there or the endless stories of corporate corruption and fat cat enrichment at the expense of their staff and us. You might even miss the falling-apart of the Conservative Party as it fights within itself over Brexit. Watching BBC Scotland’s fawning over their new ‘Champion of the Union’, Ruth Davidson, you’d never think she was in the same dysfunctional group. You certainly won’t hear of Ruth’s nauseating fawning to the Tory elite and playing the loveable rascal Scot who might steal your cutlery and damage your furniture if you leave them alone in the room. If she was black and saying those things, imagine the reaction?

I’ve reported before STV’s greater professionalism since around the end of 2014 when they clearly twigged that it made no economic sense to go on offending around 50% of their viewers. The evidence is in:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2015/04/29/propaganda-or-professionalism-on-pacific-quay/

More recent evidence that the case remains the same came on Thursday 27^th October 2016, when both covered the ‘crisis’ in NHS Scotland. Both reports were similar but, crucially, STV demonstrated why they have the brains and the ethics for a full six. Toward the end of the STV report, Bernard Ponsonby made this crucial point:

‘Frankly every government on the planet, that runs a publicly-funded health system, is having to grapple with these problems…These are not issues confined to Scotland’

You see, what you need, first, to run a Scottish 6, is the level of education to enable you to place current events in a wider historical and geographical context so that we are then able understand them properly. Second you need the ethical standards by which you feel obliged to contextualise properly even it undermines your narrow, Unionist, agenda.

So, the message here is clear, for Scotland’s opposition parties and for ‘critical friends’ of independence, such as the dread Kevin McKenna in the Herald today: ‘Do you really think anyone else could make a better job of this?’ Frankly, the Scottish opposition parties are only tiny branch offices of the parties that have a long dishonourable track record of almost destroying the NHS with their sociopathic, neo-liberal, ‘policies’. Don’t make me laugh!

 

 

Image: heraldscotland.com

‘The Tories in England might indeed want to dismantle the NHS in the long term as their critics claim. Yet, managing it so incompetently in Scotland that it’s no longer fit for purpose, is just as bad.’

These are McKenna’s words today, 29.10.16, at the end of a vitriolic rant which the Herald has sensibly or sneakily posted as an ‘opinion’ only. Is it no longer fit for purpose? See:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/10/28/nhs-scotland-bucking-the-uk-trend-despite-media-attacks/

McKenna has considerable previous as an SNP-basher since his supposed and suspicious conversion from a rabid Unionist. Here’s what Bella Caledonia wrote of him before he converted:

‘It’s a piece so loaded with self-loathing, barely recognised inferiorism and desperate, desperate, political emptiness it’s hard to approach, but we really do need to talk about Kevin.’

I don’t trust him at all. The idea that he is a ‘mole’ is rife on social media. His writing smells of ‘agent provocateur’ to me (Google it). Of course, if you suggest any such thing you are ‘paranoid’.

Either way, it’s a good gig. McKenna appears daily across the Herald, the Observer and the supposedly pro-Independence National. The theme is always the same – ‘I love the idea of independence but thae SNP bullies are spoiling everything!’ I’m beginning to hae ma doots aboot the National too! Can a whole newspaper be a mole?

You can read much more on McKenna, if your stomach is strong, at:

http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14831007.Kevin_McKenna__Is_the_NHS_in_safer_hands_under_SNP___s_stewardship_/

Other links:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/10/28/media-critic-writes-in-defence-of-the-totalitarian-snp-government/

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2011/06/06/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin

 

 

‘Scot of the Year? Not once has he [David Mundell] stood up for Scotland’ (Paul Kavanagh)

‘Surgeon’s difficult balance: Go Green or get in bed with the Tories’ (Paul Kane)

 Since my earlier attacks on the supposed ‘critical friends’, I’ve had a lot of flak from other independence supporters. My suggestion that self-declared, happy to be associated (?), ‘BBC Community Reporter 2012-Present’, Kirsty Strickland who wrote: ‘Why anti-BBC billboards are a terrible idea before indyref 2’ should be concentrating on the main target and not attacking the Inform Scotland billboards. Also, in a piece mildly sympathetic to the BBC, she should have declared her current connections with them (see ref below). This even resulted in accusations of sexism! That’s just stupid. I’ve read her many other articles on women’s rights and can recommend them fully. This is not personal. See the Linkedin details below. I’ve had several much more polite, reasoned and very long comments but I’m not reading them. I’ve got better things to do with my limited energies. If you must know, I want to do a textual comparison of STV and BBC reporting on this alleged NHS ‘crisis’ and associated mania. For some reason, I sort of want to spend my time arguing about why the SNP leadership are so kind to the Queen. That really pisses me off but I know I’d be better sticking my head up my own arse, as some ‘critical friends’ do, for all the good it would do at the moment

Today, 29.10.16, in the National, we had the above two stories, both pretty long but in the case of Pat Kane’s, bloody long! I skimmed it and noted the final, ‘This one [conversation] starts now!’ Aye right, so it does. Haven’t people been talking about this for some time long before Pat pressed his starter to launch the national (not just the newspaper of that name) debate? Was that just a wee bit ‘heid-the-baw?’ Anyway only 20% at most read beyond the headlines. How many read the whole thing especially massive pieces like this on the third Heathrow runway and how it might affect the SNP? Damn few is my guess. Book a telephone box for the focus group.

As always, the other Paul is in dogged pursuit of the real target, now that Labour has died, the Scottish Tories. Like most wee terriers he can’t take his eye off the ball.

_____________________________________________________Kirsty Strickland

Broadcast Media Professional

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Broadcast Media

Current

1.      BBC Television View Kirsty’s full profile. It’s free! Your colleagues, classmates, and 400 million other professionals are on LinkedIn.

View Kirsty’s Full Profile

Experience

Community Reporter

BBC Television

2012 – Present (4 years)

---

---

https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/9725/kirsty-strickland-why-anti-bbc-billboards-are-terrible-idea-indyref-2

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/kirsty-strickland-17b975553

http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/eight-ten-people-read-headline/1374722

 

‘This means that the press and political classes are now discussing a theoretical impossibility. Think about it for a moment, and you realise the NHS can’t go broke. It’s not an endowment with a set pot of cash, but a giant service with a yearly budget. Unlike a business, it doesn’t need to raise money from sales – as taxpayers and voters, we have the final say over how much funding it gets. This panic isn’t economic at all, but politically created.’

I haven’t got the time or energy to pick apart the flood of negative media reports and the disgusting Unionist feeding frenzy on an alleged crisis in our demonstrably robust NHS. The Audit Scotland report is flimsy, impressionistic and utterly lacking in empirical evidence. The above quote from the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty on NHS England explains better than I can how such phenomena are created for political ends.

Ignore them if you can.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/08/this-nhs-crisis-is-not-economic-its-political

 

Are the disadvantaged in Scotland actually less likely to enter higher education than the disadvantaged in England? UCAS admit they don’t actually know. I doubt it very much.

See these two important quotes below, from the full UCAS report. A retired professor, with time on his hands clearly, read the whole thing and found a pretty obvious problem in comparing the two countries – the UCAS report makes it clear that it’s not a valid comparison. ‘It’s all right for him! We’ve got a job to do.’ says the editor of BBC Reporting Scotland.

First, the headline which found its way into all the TV and Press reports before being parroted by opposition politicians as proof of failure. ‘The application rates from the most disadvantaged areas were 22 per cent in England, 24 per cent in Northern Ireland, 16 per cent in Scotland, and 20 per cent in Wales.’ (UCAS, 2016)

However, also in the report, in the summary for those with less time on their hands, there was this critical qualification:

‘In Scotland there is a substantial section of provision that is not included in UCAS figures. This is mostly full-time higher education provided in further education colleges which represents around one third of young full-time undergraduate study in Scotland. Consequently, for Scotland, this report reflects the trends in applications that are recruited through UCAS and not, as elsewhere in the UK, full-time undergraduate study in general. ’ (UCAS, 2016)

Reporting Scotland, on Friday 27^th May, did go on to give a more full account of the problems in comparing the two systems but by then the damage had been done by the opening headline: ‘Scotland lags behind England in the push to get younger people from poorer backgrounds to university.’

This 16% is a percentage of those who go directly to university. The other ‘one third’ represents those going to local FE colleges for HNC, HND or other ‘sub-degree’ courses with direct-entry arrangements allowing them to enter university, bypassing the UCAS figures. Of course if only 16% of this group come from disadvantaged areas, then it would still be 16% overall and thus no better. However, this seems unlikely given the considerable economic savings for those attending local colleges.

As I was researching for this, I found a very convincing report in September 2015, which does much of the work for me, on the very impressive ‘Adventures in Evidence’ written by Lucy Blackburn. ‘Evidence’, I like it! Here’s a quite large, selective, extract from the report titled ‘UCAS figures – comparing figures for disadvantaged students from Scotland and the rest of the UK’:

‘The problem is that there is rather less sub-degree HE in the non-Scottish parts of the UK than in Scotland but most of what there is appears to be recruited through UCAS; meanwhile in Scotland  there’s a much larger amount of HE provided in FE colleges, pretty much all at sub-degree level, which is not recruited through UCAS at all…. Indeed, it’s the HE provided in colleges which gives Scotland the edge in overall participation rates…..So to use UCAS data to compare the percentage of disadvantaged young people recruited onto degree-level courses you ought to take a little bit off both sets of figures as in both nations whatever sub-degree provision  is recruited through UCAS is likely to be biased towards the most disadvantaged.  How much should be deducted unfortunately would be a complete guess from the available data.  But there is still likely to be a large gap between the two nations for disadvantaged students – there just isn’t enough sub-degree level activity in England to make that much difference. However, to compare the percentage of disadvantaged young people in any form of HE you need to adjust the Scottish figure upwards significantly. The gap would probably disappear completely – Scotland might even do better than England.

Here’s another thing with comparative studies of this kind, right-off, it can’t be done……at least not in a way that everyone will agree is definitive or remotely true. Even if you could fill in the missing Scottish data on all the students who bypassed UCAS and went to local colleges, it’s still too complicated. There are too many variables I can think of. There are more, I’m sure, which I can’t think of. For example, you just can’t, meaningfully, compare two countries with such differing population sizes, histories, cultures, geography, economics and education systems. What if, for example, the differences in the UCAS figures were down to a combination of more immigration of minority groups, motivated to sacrifice, to push and to support their children more, in England and a residual, Calvinist or Catholic, fear of debt, in Scotland? I’m not seriously offering these as the answer, but the first is kind of echoed below by an English professor and by some evidence from the Scottish Government. I’m really using these ‘unknowables’ to reinforce the need for extreme caution in making comparisons between one country and another.

If you were to have a real go at this, empirically, the key would be to find out just how big the ‘substantial’ number not in the UCAS figures is, for Scotland and, crucially, how many of them come from disadvantaged areas. UCAS notes: ‘for the most part, demand for HE in further education colleges in Scotland is not recorded.’ These are the students applying to FE colleges for HNC, HND and other ‘sub-degree’ programmes where there is a direct-entry arrangement, from FE, into 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd year degree programmes in a university. Based on my own experience, I know that direct-entry students can make up the larger part of some cohorts in new universities.

Of course, the real stories, ignored by our media, were these, from UCAS again:

‘Application rates of 18 year olds living in disadvantaged areas in Scotland, defined using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, increased in 2016 to 16 per cent – the highest recorded. 18 year olds living in these areas became 8 per cent more likely to apply than in 2015, and 65 per cent more likely to apply than in 2006.’ (UCAS, 2016)

‘Scotland is the only country in the UK to have seen increases in student entrants from all domiciles.’ (UCAS, 2016)

Look at the last two lines there and wonder why Scottish mainstream media couldn’t use these for their headlines. What we got instead was the opening headline with the largely invalid comparison, used to pressurize SNP ministers. Perhaps the most dramatic piece of misrepresentation for naked ideological purposes (free tuition fees don’t work), appeared in the New Statesman on 3^rd May and was repeated across social media by Tory and Labour supporters.

‘Scotland is by far the worst country in the UK to be a disadvantaged student. The richest Scottish students are 3.53 times more likely to enter university aged 18 (or younger) via UCAS than the poorest ones, compared with 2.58 in Northern Ireland, 2.56 in Wales and 2.52 in England. Fewer than one in ten young people from the most disadvantaged areas begin to study towards a degree by the age of 20. And the problems are actually getting worse: just 8.4 per cent of entrants to Scotland’s elite universities came from the poorest communities in 2014/15, down from 8.8 per cent the previous year.’ (Wigmore, New Statesman, 3^rd May 2016)

The New Statesman Cricket Correspondent (usually) and SNP-basher (often), Tim Wigmore, might have been well-advised to say nothing such is his lack of understanding or care.

An earlier but different take on the figures, from that of the cricket correspondent, came from Dr Danny Dorling.  Dorling is Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford but, I guess, not a big influence on Tim Wigmore when he was there. He wrote this in Times Higher:

‘In contrast to England, Scotland shows what a real narrowing of inequalities would look like. There, the most dramatic change has been in the proportion of children from the most disadvantaged quintile of areas going to the highest tariff universities.’ (THE, 4^th February 2016)

Here’s compelling evidence of this from the 2015 UCAS End of Cycle Report (ref below, page 90):

The 2016 End of Cycle Report from UCAs will be out on June 9^th.

Perhaps, supporting my earlier guess about aspirational immigrant applicants and debt-fearing Scots, Dorling also wrote:

‘We could speculate that many young people from the rest of the EU – especially the poorer parts – have calculated that they will never earn enough to have to repay the loans (to which they are as entitled as domestic students).’

Further evidence for this idea can perhaps be seen in these Scottish data, from a Scottish Government report on the Evidence of Sectarianism (2015), revealing the possible effects of aspirational parenting and financial support among minority and immigrant groups.

The report revealed that relatively recent arrivals in Scotland (not 19^th and early 20^th Century Irish Holocaust refugees) such as Jews (48%), Hindus (52%), Muslims (34%) and Sikhs (33%) are actually much more strongly represented in the more affluent, managerial, directorial and professional, sectors of Scottish society and economy than are the Secular (25%), Protestant (24%) or Catholic (23%) groups. I am a confirmed secular atheist dudist, thank God, so I’m relieved to see that we’re beating those Christians on this, if only by 1%. Here it is again, in case you had forgotten, the real headlines we should have heard:

‘Application rates of 18 year olds living in disadvantaged areas in Scotland, defined using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, increased in 2016 to 16 per cent – the highest recorded. 18 year olds living in these areas became 8 per cent more likely to apply than in 2015 and 65 per cent more likely to apply than in 2006.’ (UCAS, 2016)

Prof Dorling also sent me a more general piece he has written, titled ‘Sons and Daughters’, (ref below) which also suggests a more positive view of the Scottish system. I couldn’t extract the graph but, in essence, it demonstrates strong performance, relative to the English, Wales and Northern Ireland system, for both Scottish schools and HE.

Conclusion:

Just as you should only compare your personal progress with yourself as you were before, you should never compare yourself to others. That way depression and madness lies. However, at the collective level (Scotland), it’s clear from all of the above, that we should certainly not allow our mainstream media to mislead us into feelings of some kind of failure, for ideological (Unionist/SNP-bashing) purposes.

It’s a very old story this – complex research data is simplified or misrepresented with potentially damaging consequences. In this at least partially democratic society, we really are entitled to better.

Links:

https://www.ucas.com/sites/default/files/jan-16-deadline-application-rates-report.pdf

https://adventuresinevidence.com/2015/09/04/ucas-figures-comparing-figures-for-disadvantaged-students-from-scotland-and-the-rest-of-the-uk/

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/its-time-snps-terrible-record-government-was-exposed

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/danny-dorling-on-university-admissions-and-inequality

https://www.ucas.com/sites/default/files/eoc-report-2015-v2.pdf

Sons and Daughters: http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id1107.pdf

http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2015/05/5191/5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

numeracy

NHS Scotland is demonstrably the best-performing in the UK and among the best in the World: Look at the evidence.

 

1. Scotland has the best and still improving A&E performance in the World. (Royal College of Emergency Medicine and Holyrood.com 1, 2)
2. Scotland has the most GPs per head of population in the UK and has had so every year since at least 2004. (Nuffield Trust 3)
3. Scotland’s GPs feel the most-satisfied, the least over-worked and the least-stressed in the UK and perhaps in the World. (Commonwealth Foundation of New York 4)
4. Scotland’s GPs are significantly more satisfied with the coordination across multiple sites and providers than in England. (Commonwealth Foundation of New York 4)
5. 94% of Scottish cancer patients rated care as ‘highly positive’ but only 61% of English cancer patients did so. (Gov.scot and NCPES 5, 6)
6. Over 100 000 treatment delays caused by junior doctor strikes in England but none in Scotland (BBC 7)
7. Bed-blocking in Scottish hospitals remains on a downward trend, with 7% fewer delayed discharges than last year. This is in stark comparison to other parts of the UK where the number of people delayed waiting to leave hospital is on the ris (Herald, Scotsman and Jersey Evening Post! BBC 8, 9)
8. Scotland spends more per capita on health (Nuffield Trust, 10)
9. Scotland, by contrast [with England], has abolished all vestiges of the ‘internal market’. (The King’s Fund 11)
10. There is relatively little cross-border flow of patients from Scotland to England. (The King’s Fund 11)
11. Scotland specifically embraces a philosophy of ‘mutuality’ between the Scottish people and the NHS. Internally it has a highly developed approach to partnership working between the trade unions and management. The partnership’s remit stretches well beyond terms and conditions to broader issues such as quality and the design of services. (The King’s Fund 11)
12. Scotland has a long and honourable tradition of clinical audit that over the years, both before and after devolution, has helped inform the approach of the other countries. (The King’s Fund 11)
13. Scotland appears to have made more progress [in developing integrated care], perhaps in part due to its relative organisational stability over the past decade (The King’s Fund 11)
14. Scotland’s greater and earlier success in getting an electronic and shared summary care record in place, despite England investing vastly greater sums in its National Programme for IT (The King’s Fund 11)
15. Public satisfaction with the Scottish NHS reaches as high as 74% in Scotland but only as high as 63% in England (King’s Fund, 12)
16. Scottish nurses more confident in coping with demand than English nurses (OK I made that one up as I wait for the RCN to come clean on the data and confirm my guess)

 

Before you explode with righteous anger about a bad experience you or a dear one has had at the hands of the NHS in Scotland, I’m not saying it’s even remotely perfect. I’m not saying every member of staff is a saint. Health care is infinitely improvable. We could spend twice as much as we currently do and some things would still go wrong. I’ve ‘been in’ a few times in recent years and all of my experience, apart from the prostate examination, has been fantastic – caring, efficient and effective – but that proves nothing I know. We have to rely on evidence of the kind I’ve given above after the statements and in the references below.

I’ve been triggered to write this overview by the recent mainstream media coverage of the Royal College of Nursing’s survey of confidence in the NHS regions across the UK, along the lines of: ‘9 out of 10 Scots nurses believe NHS cannot cope with demand’ in the Scotsman on 17^th June 2016, widely repeated across the press and on BBC Scotland TV broadcasts. The coverage has been uniformly passive taking the RCN selective media releases at face value. The RCN have refused to provide me with a full report so that I can consider the quality of their research in terms of sample, response rates, regional variations and ‘leading’ questions. I’ve requested the information under the Freedom of Information Act and also on the grounds of ethical responsibility in the use of research from their Chief Executive. I await a response.

I’ve also been motivated to do this by longer memories of media-constructed fake crises in the NHS Scotland used by especially Reporting Scotland in the run-up to the 2015 General and 2016 Holyrood elections. In the three months before the 2015 General Election, Reporting Scotland manged to suggest crises in NHS Scotland, 17 times. In the three months before the Holyrood election in 2016, they did it 14 times. Commonly, we heard of failures to meet waiting-time targets which had been set high by the Scottish government itself. We had the BMA and the Royal College of General Practitioners suggesting crises in recruitment without proper contextual information. We even had Eleanor Bradford praising an initiative in Torbay which had long-since being castigated as a failure by the local press in that area. Some of you, like me, will have been tempted into abusing our TVs.

So, see above for the truth of the matter. NHS Scotland is flawed but doing pretty well by us and deserving of a lot more recognition by mainstream media still determined in its efforts to save the Union, at any cost, in terms of scared old folk or demoralised staff.

Sources:

1. rcem.ac.uk/CEM/document?id=9891
2. https://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/scotland-only-uk-nation-improve-ae-performance
3. http://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/node/2540
4. http://newsnet.scot/commentary/scottish-gps-satisfied-least-stressed-uk-possibly-world/
5. http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2016/06/3957/0
6. http://www.ncpes.co.uk/index.php/reports/national-reports/2489-cpes-2015-national-report-pdf/file
7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36117230
8. http://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/uk-news/2016/06/21/continued-fall-in-bed-blocking-numbers-recorded-in-april/
9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36466409
10. http://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/blog/health-care-and-scottish-election
11. http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/field/field_publication_summary/four-uk-health-systems-jun13.pdf
12. http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/BSA-public-satisfaction-NHS-Kings-Fund-2015.pdf

 

 

 

 

Bias by Omission: Does selective media reporting help to maintain a weakened sense of confidence about Scottish independence?

‘Scotland, for example, has the smallest number of children living in poverty among the constituent nations of the UK, the lowest prevalence of low pay and far more young people from deprived areas going on to higher education.’ (iv)

The December 2015 report from the UK Government-funded and sponsored, Social Mobility and Child- Poverty Commission, was chaired by Blairite Labour Party grandee, Alan Milburn. When I saw his name I feared the worst but could not have been more wrong in my expectations. The above quote is taken from ‘State of the Nation: Social Mobility and Child Poverty’. Note the correct use of the term ‘higher-education’ rather than the common distortion in recent mainstream Scottish media reporting, suggesting the opposite, by ignoring the role of colleges in providing HE programmes articulated with the universities. The report commends the Scottish government for its efforts and compares these more than favourably with the neglect and the heartless actions of the UK government. However, that we should not gloat or that we must maintain, indeed increase, our efforts, does not mean that we should not be able to note the progress achieved so far. How else can we gauge what remains to be done? How else can we gather the strength to push on? How else can we build the strong sense of collective identity required to confidently grasp the levers of full political independence required to do so?

Reader, did you know about this report? I stumbled across it a few days ago. I remember no major coverage of the report’s contents, at the time, December 2015, which includes clear statistical differences, much of which are favourable to Scotland’s efforts to reduce poverty despite the limitations imposed by UK government’s austerity programmes. I’m not able to check back for the TV News coverage but my lack of awareness suggests there might have been not much. So, this is based on the internet-based archives for the newspapers and the TV websites.

If you search for ‘State of the Nation’: Social Mobility and Child Poverty’ narrowing the results to the last year, you will find, even after ten screens with sixty hits, mostly official links to the original report and to academic research centres. The BBC website, the FT, Huffington Post, Prospect, Guardian, Independent and Daily Mail newspapers did report on it but made no mention of Scotland at all, despite their being an eighteen-page section just on Scotland,  thus implying the worst of the findings apply uniformly to the whole of the UK. STV went, not-so-encouragingly, with the headline: Scotland still has ‘very long way to go’ to end child poverty, (as it does). Though the article in full did cover a few of the positive aspects of the Scottish context, not everyone reads the full article. The impact of headlines can be considerable and they need to be fully-reflective of the contents if they are not to mislead.

I’m reminded, here, of the comments many made about my research revealing BBC bias in 2014 and wondering why I had not explored ‘bias by omission’. Correctly, they pointed out that the tendency to omit good news for the Yes campaign was a powerful and insidious form of bias which may have helped the No campaign. I replied that bias by omission, though clearly important, was just too difficult (impossible?) to demonstrate scientifically. A media organisation can just say that they were too busy, that they had better more ‘newsworthy’ stories or that they had simply missed that evidence. They might even suggest that they had ignored it because they doubted its reliability. This, however, was a UK government sponsored piece of research presented to Parliament so there was little excuse for its omission or simplification. So, a little late in the day, but still worth reporting and sharing across social media, here are the main findings specific to Scotland:

‘Once housing costs are taken into account, relative poverty ranges from one in five children in Scotland (21 per cent) to nearly twice this (37 per cent) in London’. (‘State of the Nation’ http://www.gov.uk, 2015: 113)

That twenty-one percent of Scotland’s children live in poverty is a monstrous blemish on the face of a democracy aspiring to much better. That it is higher everywhere else in the UK and nearly twice as high in our globalised golden capital does not excuse it, I know that. The current Scottish government makes nothing of such a comparison. It simply accepts that it is unacceptable and is doing what it can to remedy the situation.

Surely these would be newsworthy headlines but of course they might at the same time encourage Scots to think they are capable in some way. Further, with particular regard to ‘persistent’ as opposed to ‘temporary’ poverty, see this:

‘As well as being too high, persistent poverty in the UK is unevenly spread. The MCS Study cited above found greater shares of children in persistent poverty in Wales and Northern Ireland than England and Scotland (21 per cent and 19 per cent, compared to 16 per cent and 13 per cent)’ (148)

This suggests that persistent poverty in Scotland is nearer to a 1 in 10 figure. Still disgraceful, I know but worth knowing about because this is the form that really requires determined, intensive, action to change it. With regard to employment, there was also some good news which could be used to inform further efforts and, I repeat, to strengthen our sense that we have both the collective competence and the shared values required to do so:

‘The trends in one of the key drivers of child poverty – employment – are also encouraging:

• The proportion of children in Scotland who live in workless households has decreased rapidly in recent years and is slightly lower than the UK average – only 10.9 per cent of children in Scotland live in workless households compared to 15.8 per cent in 2012 and 11.8 per cent in the UK as a whole;
• More than six out of 10 (62.5 per cent) children in Scotland live in households where all adults are in work, making Scotland the region with the most ‘fully working’ households in the UK – for example, only 54.6 per cent of children in England live in households where all adults are in work;
• Scotland has the second highest parental employment rate of any region of the UK: 83.2 per cent of people with dependent children are in work. This is driven by very high employment of mothers in couples; 79.6 per cent of whom are in work compared to 71.9 per cent in England. However, lone parents in Scotland have a relatively low employment rate – only 62.2 per cent are in work (compared to, for example, 69.8 per cent in the East of England and 69.2 per cent in Wales).’ (169)

Once more, some good news we don’t hear and, usefully, some bad news about single-mothers which should inform future actions, based on evidence? Returning to higher-education, this up-to-date (December 2015) and rigorously evidenced report contradicts the MSM distortions:

‘Young people in Scotland – including those from the most disadvantaged areas – are significantly more likely to participate in higher education than people in the rest of the UK. For example, as Table 7.1 shows, far fewer young people in Scotland live in areas with low rates of participation in higher education than elsewhere in the UK.’ (175)

I couldn’t reproduce the table but you can see it on page 175 of the report.

There is, in the report, more bad news which affects Scotland as much as in England. I don’t deny that. By all means read it. My main point is about mainstream media coverage and its tendency to undermine our confidence about independence.

Finally, the report has much to say that is positive about the plans and the actions of the current SNP government. Though chaired by a Labour Party grandee, Milburn, there is a generous and accurate recognition of the achievements of the SNP in Scotland which contrasts markedly with the bitter, twisted or at best, grudging, statements from Labour in Scotland or from our Tory Governor General, which we see faithfully reported on BBC Scotland and in most of our newspapers. Here are a few highlights from the section on education:

‘The Scottish Government has introduced a number of policy initiatives aiming to make a reality of this commitment to improve social mobility in Scotland, including:

1. Plans to increase entitlements to free, high-quality early learning and childcare provision to 30 hours per week during term-time for all three- and four-year-olds and disadvantaged two-year-olds, by 2020;

2. Placing a new statutory duty on local authorities and Scottish Government ministers to take action to narrow the socio-economic educational attainment gap and publish reports on progress through the Education (Scotland) Bill 2015. (179)
3. Developing a new National Improvement Framework for Scottish Education with a key goal of closing the attainment gap, which will introduce national standardised assessment of literacy and numeracy in P1, P4, P7 and S3 – to be implemented nationally from 2017, allowing the performance of the school system for the most disadvantaged children to be tracked and reported on annually;

4. Providing £100 million funding for the Scottish Attainment Challenge over four years, targeted at primary schools in deprived areas of Scotland and aiming to improve children’s literacy, numeracy, health and well-being;

5. Expanding entitlement to the Education Maintenance Allowance, increasing income thresholds by 20 per cent (to £24,421 for those in families with only one child and £26,884 for those with two or more children), extending eligibility to cover part-time study – meaning that 57,000 young people in Scotland (63 per cent more than in 2013–14) will be eligible for support of £30 per week to stay in education post-16 from January 2016;

6. Setting a long-term ambition to equalise the chances of university access between children in the most and least deprived areas in Scotland, and establishing the independent Commission on Widening Access to look at the evidence on widening participation, identify best practice and propose new targets, due to report in Spring 2016. (180)

If you can find any broadcast or written report, outside of independent new media sources, covering much of this, let me know and I’ll eat…………….. that potato I’ve been keeping because it looks like Brian Taylor.

Source:

‘State of the Nation’: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, presented to House of Commons December 2015 at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485926/State_of_the_nation_2015__social_mobility_and_child_poverty_in_Great_Britain.pdf