Friday 25 September 2009

The Big Care Debate, morphing and geography.


We think we ought to get out more here at ND Central but because 10 minute appointments often mean between 8 to 2 minutes down time per patient we find ourselves using the super slow dial up connection called N3 to while away the hours.

We stumbled across this website by accident after following links to it and thought we ought to draw it to our readers’ attention for two reasons.

The first is that there is a serious issue here namely the funding of care in old age in our increasingly elderly and therefore more dependant population.

The second is the quality of the website.

We start with number 2 first. What led us to the website was the offer of morphing software to see how we would look in old age.

Always a good laugh because try to predict how your friends from school would look now if you meet up with them after say 25 years. Who would be bald, grey, fatter, thinner than you last time you met them? Could you accurately predict how they would look now? So we thought we would try some of our younger looking photographs for a laugh.

Click on the photograph and see what happens. We tried it several times and absolutely nothing happened. Note the little logo in the top right “Care Support Independence” – CSI, wonder where they got that from?

Going back to our original link we found that if you click on the Face of Care link in the first paragraph something does happen but can you get to the morphing part of the site? Try it and see how quickly you lose interest.

Next have a look at the map of the UK and try and locate your nearest Big Care Debate (BCD) centre. We are old enough to have done geography but when was Newcastle ever located several miles off the east coast in the North Sea? Or Carlisle located closer to the east coast than the west coast? Similarly with Leeds which has moved from its roughly central location closer to Hull which is also now in the North Sea and Manchester seems to have jumped the Pennies to be roughly where Sheffield should be.

May be we have missed something? May be global warming has altered the map of Britain as the sea levels rise? Certainly Wales looks like it has had a high speed impact with the Irish Sea on the map unless this is Nu Labour geography?*

The blog section has been bigger than our own little missive with 149 posts since possibly April the last one being the 1st September. Not bad from a concerned population of 60 million. Still we expect there to be a bit more interest in the general election blog whenever that will be.

Website design is a nice little earner so no doubt this little piece of useless non functioning Party propaganda would have cost a fair bit in order to advance the “debate” no further.

The serious issue is that of funding old age care. We suspect the decision has already been taken as with so many Party debates they listen hard to those who repeat their own mantra.

The options seem to be, and we admit to paraphrasing a summary we found here (our original link), costs shared by the person receiving the care and the Government (the current model with most being from the person), an insurance based approach for some care (is that similar to the National Insurance cradle to the grave model?), or a comprehensive state insurance scheme (perhaps called National Insurance?).

You can’t have something for nothing as we all age costs will inevitably rise. More dependence and less young creators of wealth do not boded well for when we retire. We can hear us now: “we don’t want to be in an old folks home surrounded by old people" when in fact most people then will be old so even care in the community will be similar.

Still at least the Party is having a debate with a useless website as its portal to that debate.

Praise be to the Party and all its well spent money on healthcare related IT (failures?).

*we jest.

1 comment:

Danni said...

Thanks for the laugh. Nice to know I go to college in the North Sea, being east of Newcastle (South Shields). I thought we were just on the coast :D