#nhs workers

[funtime-downtown]

The UK is an absolute cluster fuck at the moment, people are suffering and all our gov wants to do atm is launch a smear campaign against workers and individuals who advocate for them (Mick Lynch) also teach the kids maths.

The audacity of implying that nurses and paramedics are endangering lives when they strike, when the actual endangerment is the calculated destruction of the NHS. The implications that nurses don't work hard enough when they work ridiculously tiring shifts. That if they worked some more they wouldn't need food banks.

That is simply one example of how workers are being mistreated and exploited by this government. And its an important one, we as a country were united by our health service, one we all could be proud of and rally behind.

Our workers desvere so much better, striking is the solution and it's not a decision taken lightly by workers. They need protect.

If you are uk based I'm asking that you sign this petition, demonstrate some solidarity.

[captain-casual]

[dervampireprince]

If you're a UK citizen, please sign. (You cannot sign unless you are a UK citizen). We shouldn't be punished for falling in love with someone from another country. And certainly shouldn't have to earn above the average UK wage.

[ID: Text that reads: Don’t increase the income requirement for family visas to £38,700. Currently the financial requirements to bring your spouse to the UK is £18,600 per year and now the Government wants to more than double it. Most people in the UK don’t make that per year. We believe this policy punishes those who fall in love with someone with a different nationality. 59,809 signatures out of 100,000.]

Link to petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652602

[radioactiveradley]

me to a coworker: oh hey has our molly arrived yet? (meaning: our weekly shipment of Molybdenum-99, the parent isotope of Technetium-99m, the most common radioisotope used in nuclear med)

patient waiting for a scan who happened to overhear: your what

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

People saying on that NHS post there’s nothing we can do til 2024...

Voting is not the only way to influence the country you live in. In many ways, it’s the least effective way.

If you vote IDK, Labour, and think job done, you’re part of the problem.

The number one thing you can do to help save the NHS right now is to support the nurse’s strike, and the junior doctor’s strike. Will the aims of these unions solve the whole problem? Obviously not. But supporting the strikes sends a general message to the government about who’s side “the public” are on, and what the public will accept.

Things you can do to support the strikes:

1) Donate to strike funds. Long term strikes struggle, because people don’t get paid. Many nurses can’t afford to save much on their current wage. Many doctors come out of med school with crippling commercial debt and not in a good financial state. These things make it hard to strike. So if you can help people go on strike for more days, that’s super important.

2) Visit picket lines. Picket lines are in effect protests- if you’d go on a protest march for the NHS, then go and visit the picket line. Talk to whoever’s on the picket line and offer your soldiarity and support. This makes a huge different to striking workers. If you can bring those on the picket line hot drinks or snacks, this will likely be super appreciated!

3) Post about your support for the strikes on your social media. The mainstream media are trying to run with the message “no-one” supports the strikes. You can help combat this.

4) Similar to the above, phone in to talk radio, write letters to newspapers expressing your support of the strikes.

5) Challenge people who criticise the strikes. E.g. if someone says “They’re putting people at risk by striking” you can say “the Tories are putting the NHS at risk of collapse, so they have to do something”.

I’m sure those nurses who have been on strike will have more to add, as they’re the ones facing this directly!

[just-some-moss-and-bones]

people see the economy and society in general coming to a halt and don't think the workers should be payed more and instead think they should just stop striking

it's the lack of critical thinking like yes we all want the strikes to stop and how do we get there ? their answer is just stop. the right answer us listen to why their striking, pay them, protect them. why is that so hard. I just don't get it

[phleb0tomist]

it is getting so ridiculously hard to access doctor’s appointments. the booking line for my doc’s office opens at 8:30am so i call at exactly 8:30 only for my call to be rejected because they are already taking a call. they don’t even put me into a queue, the phone just forcibly cancels the call. the system at my local doctors is for patients to call over and over at the designated time slot until a staff member becomes available to pick up the phone. they don’t have a better system than that. for me this took about 25 redials over 15 minutes (not all my call attempts even fit in my screenshot). THEN i am finally placed on hold in a queue. they can’t tell you how many people are in the queue, they can only tell you it’s ‘more than 5’. i wait in the queue for 10 minutes, and when i finally get to talk to a person she says that all appointments are booked, and i cannot book an appointment for a future date. the only way to get an appointment is to call back the next time the line opens up again. so i will be doing this again soon

[cobragardens]

The Missed(?) Connection

Here's a story about how fucking stupid life is.

When I worked in Manchester city centre I would commute in every day on the train from one of the market towns. This would have been c. 2014-2015, before I started having panic attacks about going to work but after I'd been written up for being 5-10 minutes late most mornings.*

Every morning I would walk up Deansgate from Deansgate Station to the office, stopping at a Sainsburys Local to buy breakfast. This particular morning I was late as usual, so the great migration had already browsed the foliage of yogurt bars and uninspiring sandwiches and thundered onwards; besides the store clerk there was only one other person in the shop with me.

Do you believe people can fall in love at first sight?

I did not believe any such thing, so it was QUITE THE SURPRISE to me when I did it.

Here is what I remember about her:

*She was wearing one of those Nepalese yak-wool jackets with the bright rainbow-dyed yarn they sell at the Christmas market every year. Most such garments end up smelling strongly of b.o. and weed stank, grimy and unravelling, but hers was bright and well kept, and she wore it over a short black skirt and tights and managed to achieve a kind of insouciant charm with it so marked that it didn't occur to me for years after that she might have been wearing the jacket for pride reasons.

*She was trans and white and straight-sized.

*Her hair was a well-chosen blonde that would look plausible on her when freshly colored, which at that moment it was not; her hairstyle was a layered cut no longer than her shoulders and in need of a trim.

*The fashion of the time called for contouring and false lashes, but instead she was wearing simple-looking makeup that suited her: black mascara and a lip color somewhere between red and berry. I remember the red of the lip color did not match the cheerful Sno-Cone red of the rainbow jacket but was perfect for her complexion.

*Her black ankle boots had mid heels--the thick sturdy kind of heel good for walking a mile or two in the city if your back doesn't hate you yet. She would have been a bit taller than I am even in stocking feet; the heeled boots took the length of her legs past enviable into devastating.

*She wore a few sterling silver rings, but not so many it looked like dress-up, which is the mistake I always make with them. I coveted at least one of the rings, but I no longer recall their motifs. Her hands were fine-boned, the nails unpainted, knuckles a bit raw and chapped pink, in need of hand cream; I found them enchantingly beautiful.

*I stood behind her while she paid for her breakfast. I recall thinking the style of her pocketbook was cool. I don't remember now what it looked like.

*Her face wore that mildly unhappy cast people's faces have when they're going to work in the mornings and haven't quite finished the process of stuffing away enough of their real life's problems to appear together and professional. Just ever so slightly fragile.

I had no contact with anyone queer in the country. To my knowledge I'd met three trans people in my whole life. I'd dated a grand total of one woman. All my other previous relationships had been with men.

And none of that mattered, because I was in love. Just like that.

I don't know how I knew, but I knew, and the certainty was simple and clear and easy: I knew I wanted to ask her to dinner, and I knew I wanted to know her on whatever terms she was comfortable being known. I knew I wanted to give her footrubs and brush her hair and ask her about her day and memorize which of her coworkers were giving her grief.

And I didn't ask her out. Because I was late for work. Late enough that it didn't matter if I stopped to get breakfast at the Sainsburys Local, but also late enough that if I stopped to talk to someone I'd be written up again.

I am sure you will agree that this sucks on multiple levels. For one thing it sucks that I was not a person worthy of her, a person not in danger of being fired, a person capable of getting to work on time more than 1 day in 4, a person who could afford to be late long enough to chat her up.

For another thing it's a bit Pink Floyd's The Wall that I was so beaten down by life I was financially and psychologically compelled to crush part of my soul, and who knows, maybe a shot at real love and a beautiful future, in order to remain employed.

It haunts me that there are things that I don't even know I don't know about myself, and that I experienced something that can't be explained, and of course most of all that I will never know whether that feeling of serendipity was accurate.

But the thing that really gets up my nose about this event, the thing that makes me think that any god that exists must be an evil motherfucker, is this:

The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try for something precious and true and my inability to meet that opportunity were the same moment, brought about by the same set of circumstances. If I hadn't been so late to work I couldn't stop to talk to her, I wouldn't have been in the shop at the same time she was. I would never have seen her.

*Improbably, I was unaware at the time that I had anxiety.

[aquilacalvitium]

If you're reading this, it means that I am now officially working for the NHS!

If you're reading this within the last few hours of it being posted, it means I am currently in my first training session!

All this means a lot less time for me to be online. I will probably be pretty active in the evenings, especially during my first week, as it's an easy, mindless thing to do when I'm tired.

This also means, less art and fanfiction updates. I mean my brain is always going so even if I'm at work I'll likely be throwing ideas around inside my head and end up coming up with a few things, but getting them out into the open takes energy and concentration which I won't have a lot of as my body adjusts to this new sleeping schedule.

So unless I feel particularly motivated one evening, don't expect anything original from me for about a week or so.

I promise I'll keep working on my submas fanfiction, and I still want to have a go at a mini comic with my fnaf glamrock sona, but other projects like my pokemon webcomic or that one crowd drawing that I've been putting off for months will have to wait a while.

In regards to that last one, I'm slowly working my way up to it again! I know a bunch of people are excited to have their sonas put in, so I promise I'll do my best not to make you wait too much longer!

Anyway! I'm terrified of starting this new job, but I can only do my best! Wish me luck!

[nando161mando]

The whole gravy train needs to be derailed. MPs should never receive payments from vested interests.

#greed #Labour #ukpolitics

[enbycrip]

Yesterday I posted in a Facebook thread about “your opinion is less valuable if you’re not an expert” essentially with “yes, but with the caveat that this is much more complex with direct personal experience - notably there is a big issue with doctors, especially GPs, treating women and women-read people as unreliable witnesses to their own symptoms throughout the history of medicine which still continues today” and noted that my GP had initially told me repeatedly that my fucking sublaxions were somatic depression”.

I got a three-reply screed from someone claiming to be a nurse who said a) it’s my fault for going to a GP, not a specialist b) why am I complaining on the internet instead of “taking responsibility for my own health”? c) she disregards patients who talk about their health on the internet d) it’s the fault of people like me if the entire medical system collapses e) “your GP will still do better diagnosing other things than you do”.

And obviously I replied pointing out the truly massive unfounded assumptions she made about me, her clear lack of understanding of the U.K. medical system, and her huge logical fallacies, but honestly the gut punch yet again at yet *another* confirmation of the systemic disdain and defensiveness disabled and chronically ill people are dealing with from healthcare workers has left me feeling absolutely floored.

This was a level and detached a remark about “historically there has been a serious issue with how systemically marginalised people are treated where personal experiences are concerned, particularly in healthcare, and this still persists to this day - a notable intersection is the ongoing higher mortality rate of black women in childbirth” and the result was this vicious personal attack full of incredibly baseless assumptions.

I am genuinely sorry to load any decent healthcare workers reading this with anything else given the level of bullshit you have to deal with from our political class, but yet again I need to ask you to challenge this behaviour in your colleagues wherever you see it. Including in private spaces which patients will never see.

Because this online attack mirrors so many of my personal experiences in trying to get really quite basic healthcare. Worse yet, I *know* those experiences were serious factors in killing disabled friends and acquaintances, and I know other people who are going to suffer life-altering ongoing health effects due to them.

[aquilas-designs]

GUESS WHO’S OFFICIALLY AN NHS WORKER??? 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Starting on Tuesday the 13th of March 2023, I will be starting my apprenticeship in admin work for the National Health Service!

It’ll be a lot of writing and maths and data entry and studying and I can’t wait!! It might not be the most glamorous job in the world, but I don’t mind. I’m so thrilled that I get to work for what is basically the backbone of the UK!

Unfortunately this does mean I’ll have less time for art as well as all my other hobbies, but I’ll still draw! It just means art will be slower than normal. My new studies will be top priority!

-

If you like my art, please consider reblogging!

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

NHS Pediatric Patients waiting more than THREE (3) YEARS for operations.

15,000 peds operations canceled in 2022

500 people dying every week bc they cannot access care

7 million people waiting

Dr. Anita Raja

[bisexualspace]

anyways people bitching that winter/Christmas season “isn’t the right time to strike” or complaining about rail workers, postal workers, and health care staff striking during the busiest part of the year, can just get fucked

Striking shouldn’t be convenient! We don’t want it to be convenient! These systems have functioned on our good will for decades, and you’re mad that your package is delayed? You should be more upset over nurses and junior doctors needing to use food banks to feed themselves and their families. Rail workers and postal workers not being able to afford to heat their homes. Functional pay cuts of 30% over the past 15 years.

The whole bloody point is to show people how valuable our work is.

[masckarlach]

i will noy be unnecessarily mean and worrisome chanted over and over

[gwydionmisha]

I am still angry about the Tories only giving health care workers a 1% pay raise in the worst part of the pandemic when they were overwhelmed and literally dying as a deliberate fuck you to them all.

The cost of living and heating in particular have skyrocketted in the UK.  Tories are complaining that they cannot afford to pay ambulance drivers nurses, etc. a living wage. 

I have to ask: Can they afford not to?  Because driving people to quit isn’t going to fix NHS wait times.  Asking year after year for more sacrifices from people this understaffed isn’t the solution.  Actually paying people decently and reopening the borders to health care workers would be a good start to actually fixing things.  So would actually funding the health service properly instead of asking for more belt tightening every year when it’s already down to the bone.

Tories are deliberately killing the NHS.  They broke it.  They refuse to fix it.