…“Now is the moment to put the failures of the past behind us, and set our sights on the NHS being the most cutting-edge system in the world for the use of technology to improve our health, make our lives easier, and make money go further, harnessing the amazing explosion of innovation that the connection of billions of minds through
Tag Archives: United Kingdom
Lockdowns save, lockdowns kill: Valuing life after coronashock
The scale and severity of the coronavirus pandemic is a shock to health systems. It is a shock to economies and governments. It is also a shock to the life sciences, which were meant to anticipate a pandemic of this magnitude, but failed to do so. The “life sciences” in question are virology, epidemiology, biomedicine and pharmacology. But the social, …
Covid-19: Bringing the social back in
The impact of changes – social and medical – brought about by Covid-19 will not be known for some time. So far, in the UK at least, numbers have dominated public debate, with a warning that up to 500,000 people could die, reducing to around 20,000 with social distancing. Much has been made of the public response, with complaints of …
“Stay the fuck at home”
On April 5th, NHS Million, an unofficial campaign for people who “love and cherish” the UK’s National Health Service, tweeted a video of a distressed nurse recording a message in her car. The tweet was aimed, NHS Million said, at those who were “ignoring the rules,” so that they would understand “the reality of the situation.” The rules …
Sticky notes
I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to an apparently random collection of things. On each paper was written the name of the object it was stuck to; ‘toaster’, ‘cooker’, ‘sink’, ‘chair’ and so on. Over time, as she forgot …
Changing Time
History and dementia are both concerned with time. Writing history is all about folding time, making sense of things that have become confused and confusing with the passage of time by bringing different points into contact. And dementia, as the reflections in this series show, suggest different ways of experiencing and enacting time. These variations in dealing with time …