COVID19

[Banquo]

Because the work outsourced to private companies is all going so well?

Perhaps both private and public sector have their pros and cons, that they will inevitably do some things well and some things poorly, and that randomly pointing at good or bad examples doesn’t mean that sector is fatally flawed. Remember when the failed private sector attempt to create a central NHS IT system was proof that all private sector involvement was a huge waste of money and doomed to be late and/or a failure. Well, it’s seems the public sector is also found wanting on a large scale IT project. Perhaps there will be examples of both good and bad from both sectors, wherever you look? I’ve worked in both sectors and had both public and private healthcare and, from my experience, this is true.

Under normal circumstances, when a private sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, the organisation disappears and is replaced by another. When a public sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, a few scapegoats are sacrificed and normal jogging continues.

yep

[Sandydragon]

Not going to argue with that but this all started as private sector bad v public sector good. That’s certainly not the case in the UK’s response. Both have been both good and bad.
If anything, the most detrimental piece of ‘dick sucking’ in the U.K. was probably PHE refusal to use private sector labs for testing. That’s not to say private sector companies didn’t feck up as well but that it’s not just public sector = good and private sector = bad.

Indeed. A sensible health care system uses both.

Though, maybe leaving a public sector organisation to develop an app wasn’t the best plan ever.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/contact ... ight-trial

Yeah. I did groan originally when I saw how this was being developed.

[Mellsblue]

Because the work outsourced to private companies is all going so well?

Perhaps both private and public sector have their pros and cons, that they will inevitably do some things well and some things poorly, and that randomly pointing at good or bad examples doesn’t mean that sector is fatally flawed. Remember when the failed private sector attempt to create a central NHS IT system was proof that all private sector involvement was a huge waste of money and doomed to be late and/or a failure. Well, it’s seems the public sector is also found wanting on a large scale IT project. Perhaps there will be examples of both good and bad from both sectors, wherever you look? I’ve worked in both sectors and had both public and private healthcare and, from my experience, this is true.

Under normal circumstances, when a private sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, the organisation disappears and is replaced by another. When a public sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, a few scapegoats are sacrificed and normal jogging continues.

Completely agree. I currently work in the public sector and I regularly see examples of this, with the wrong scapegoats on numerous occasions; however, I've also seen examples of outsourcing going spectacularly wrong. Horses for courses......

[Mellsblue]

With serendipitous timing:

[Son of Mathonwy]

NHSX are sh*t. I sit on the local health and social care IT forum (FML), and they couldn't organise....well anything. I'm afraid IT in the NHS is just a dripping roast for private work and public sector workers alike. Why they couldn't just piggy back on someone elses work outside the UK is anyone's guesss.

Agreed, this reinvention of the wheel* when time was short was ridiculous.


*I think ours may be octagonal.

[Banquo]

NHSX are sh*t. I sit on the local health and social care IT forum (FML), and they couldn't organise....well anything. I'm afraid IT in the NHS is just a dripping roast for private work and public sector workers alike. Why they couldn't just piggy back on someone elses work outside the UK is anyone's guesss.

Agreed, this reinvention of the wheel* when time was short was ridiculous.


*I think ours may be octagonal.

Yep- I'm afraid 'not invented here' is a recurring phrase in this crisis.

[Banquo]

With serendipitous timing:

The big acute trusts started doing this over a year ago, procurement rules were changed to enable it. We went through a very comedic 'new process' about this time last year.

[Digby]

Perhaps both private and public sector have their pros and cons, that they will inevitably do some things well and some things poorly, and that randomly pointing at good or bad examples doesn’t mean that sector is fatally flawed. Remember when the failed private sector attempt to create a central NHS IT system was proof that all private sector involvement was a huge waste of money and doomed to be late and/or a failure. Well, it’s seems the public sector is also found wanting on a large scale IT project. Perhaps there will be examples of both good and bad from both sectors, wherever you look? I’ve worked in both sectors and had both public and private healthcare and, from my experience, this is true.

Under normal circumstances, when a private sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, the organisation disappears and is replaced by another. When a public sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, a few scapegoats are sacrificed and normal jogging continues.

Completely agree. I currently work in the public sector and I regularly see examples of this, with the wrong scapegoats on numerous occasions; however, I've also seen examples of outsourcing going spectacularly wrong. Horses for courses......

Doing a good job isn't always related to whether a company makes money. Just look at Serco

[Stom]

NHSX are sh*t. I sit on the local health and social care IT forum (FML), and they couldn't organise....well anything. I'm afraid IT in the NHS is just a dripping roast for private work and public sector workers alike. Why they couldn't just piggy back on someone elses work outside the UK is anyone's guesss.

My uncle used to work in IT for the NHS. Let's just say that, as a teenager, I knew more about IT than he did.

A pretty sad state of affairs.

[Banquo]

NHSX are sh*t. I sit on the local health and social care IT forum (FML), and they couldn't organise....well anything. I'm afraid IT in the NHS is just a dripping roast for private work and public sector workers alike. Why they couldn't just piggy back on someone elses work outside the UK is anyone's guesss.

My uncle used to work in IT for the NHS. Let's just say that, as a teenager, I knew more about IT than he did.

A pretty sad state of affairs.

You need highly technically skilled folks, with brilliant change management skills. That's that then.

[Banquo]

Under normal circumstances, when a private sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, the organisation disappears and is replaced by another. When a public sector organisation fails to deliver consistently, a few scapegoats are sacrificed and normal jogging continues.

Completely agree. I currently work in the public sector and I regularly see examples of this, with the wrong scapegoats on numerous occasions; however, I've also seen examples of outsourcing going spectacularly wrong. Horses for courses......

Doing a good job isn't always related to whether a company makes money. Just look at Serco

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

[Digby]

Completely agree. I currently work in the public sector and I regularly see examples of this, with the wrong scapegoats on numerous occasions; however, I've also seen examples of outsourcing going spectacularly wrong. Horses for courses......

Doing a good job isn't always related to whether a company makes money. Just look at Serco

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

At the level of an individual company it's actually hard (if not worthless) trying to out examples that illustrate one war or t'other. Overall capitalism sees some margin of companies fail and that allows a reassignment of labour and capital, it was a little daft to even give the example of Serco (albeit not as daft as the awarding of contracts to Serco) when as part of that bigger picture if one strips out companies failing that are piece of crap startups, now defunct market areas (not much business in the bear baiting world for instance) the number who actually fail in the market isn't that huge and probably compares with the constant redesigning of public service delivery anyway. And actually beyond startups that should never have started the likely biggest cause of failure is insufficient cash flow, and that can happen to good business that would otherwise be viable as well as bad.

[Mellsblue]

[Digby]

We've had our political leaders encourage this type of thinking when it suited them, how they get the genie back in the bottle now I don't know.

[Galfon]

There are a few parties that would happily take those scores as a mandate to govern

[Sandydragon]

Completely agree. I currently work in the public sector and I regularly see examples of this, with the wrong scapegoats on numerous occasions; however, I've also seen examples of outsourcing going spectacularly wrong. Horses for courses......

Doing a good job isn't always related to whether a company makes money. Just look at Serco

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

Amen to that. Outsourcing seems like such a good idea and then you realise that the service is total crap and you still pay a lot of money for the privilege.

[Sandydragon]

Thats deeply troubling, but not a surprise. The 5G issue is just nuts. But a surprising number of people believe that covid started in a Chinese lab and leaked from there.

[Son of Mathonwy]

Doing a good job isn't always related to whether a company makes money. Just look at Serco

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

Amen to that. Outsourcing seems like such a good idea and then you realise that the service is total crap and you still pay a lot of money for the privilege.

Someone tell this government.

[Banquo]

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

Amen to that. Outsourcing seems like such a good idea and then you realise that the service is total crap and you still pay a lot of money for the privilege.

Someone tell this government.

Outsourcing is only as good as the procurer/specifier; we provide an excellent (easy fast access to unlimited free treatment with high satisfaction scores from patients) outsourced service for example (I would say that, and we are not for profit), but that's because we developed the contract with someone who knew what they were doing and who was prepared to listen when they didn't. As before, its not outsourcing bad, insourced govt/public services good.......but things like PFI have been a disaster.

[morepork]

Hey, you could be over here. The government has pretty much given up even pretending to be engaged in public health and is instead investing a lot of effort in disinformation, if not outright lies. They are claiming testing is not required, that the problem is contained, and not to worry about anything. Within the inner sanctum, however, a different reality is evident. They are going to hold an event at one of Dumkopf's golf clubs. For 250K you can spend an hour with fatty in person, but you must be take a Covid test prior to attending. I doubt that there are many qualified health professionals left to supervise this testing, so we can only hope for a few false-negatives and that one of these wealthy fuckheads spreads the love to fatty.

[Mellsblue]

Don't think Serco makes money tbh- or at least miniscule margins. They are sh*t though. All the BPM companies are generally crap- bid to take over a dog and run it for less, hoping they can implement something magical to take out cost, or use contract variations to make their money.

Amen to that. Outsourcing seems like such a good idea and then you realise that the service is total crap and you still pay a lot of money for the privilege.

Someone tell this government.

So you agree with the govt when it decided to develop an in house track and trace app and when it didn’t use private sector labs therefore limiting testing capacity?

[Digby]

In defence of our government nobody has automated track and trace up and running, everyone is ambling around on this one, one can only hope they're doing so with a view to the data collation being employed by google, apple et al

[Stom]

In defence of our government nobody has automated track and trace up and running, everyone is ambling around on this one, one can only hope they're doing so with a view to the data collation being employed by google, apple et al

Was talking about track and trace over here with a friend yesterday.

His wife had TB a few years back. They didn't track anyone she'd been in contact with, just said that those she met regularly should get tested... Note "should". Only until after, when she wanted to come off the meds, they told her they'd report her to the police if she did...

So no effort to actually do anything about it except cover backs.

Meanwhile, for Covid, there's been no widespread testing of people who have come in contact with carriers. We're lucky, it's still not spread (population density #1 factor?), but it explains the extremely high ratio of deaths to cases. Still a very low death rate compared to population, but absolutely 0 track and trace.

[Digby]

In defence of our government nobody has automated track and trace up and running, everyone is ambling around on this one, one can only hope they're doing so with a view to the data collation being employed by google, apple et al

Was talking about track and trace over here with a friend yesterday.

His wife had TB a few years back. They didn't track anyone she'd been in contact with, just said that those she met regularly should get tested... Note "should". Only until after, when she wanted to come off the meds, they told her they'd report her to the police if she did...

So no effort to actually do anything about it except cover backs.

Meanwhile, for Covid, there's been no widespread testing of people who have come in contact with carriers. We're lucky, it's still not spread (population density #1 factor?), but it explains the extremely high ratio of deaths to cases. Still a very low death rate compared to population, but absolutely 0 track and trace.

That sounds more like manual track and trace? In which case for all we've hired a number of people we're (so far) getting a mix of poor and limited returns, not helped by the messaging being put out by our government and Agent Cummings and Goings. So on the manual track and trace we can take a more reasonable swing at Johnson, Patel, Hanock et al, I was just thinking on the automated front even those countries that went with Google/Apple from the off (or when Google/Apple said no to allowing access) don't exactly have functioning automated systems that cover their countries and might end up anyway with too limited national systems

[Galfon]

Slow to react #34 ?
meat & greet (covid)..link shown over 1 month ago in US I recall.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... oronavirus

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-germa ... a-53883372

new outbreak in China also thought to be from imported meat/fish...

u/date (beeb): 'Another factor could be noisy machinery, which requires people to talk more loudly or shout, which can increase the spread of infected droplets.'