Category Archives: Politics, Policies And Process
Time Is Energy (And ‘Clocks Forward’ Daylight Uses Less)
‘Daylight saving’ is a strange notion. But ‘daylight energy saving’ is a very different consideration. How we arrange the hours of light and darkness across our working day has many impacts – which makes it all the more curious that so little high profile or current research has been focused on British Summer Time and rationales for why the clocks ‘go back’ in the Winter.
My recent piece on British Summer Time has drawn a lot of comment, both on and off this website.
There are people who seem simply not to mind whether / when it’s light or dark as they go about their daily business, but there are many others who have responded quite strongly in terms of their need for as much daylight as possible. It must be very helpful in some ways not to mind how dark it is, but it’s quite incomprehensible to others that there are folk who genuinely ‘don’t mind’. Perhaps it’s rather like being ‘colour blind’ – if you don’t perceive the difference between red and green you just accept (and may not even know about) it; or maybe some of us have physiologies which are more photo-sensitive than others.
Daylight saving is energy saving
The most important thing to come out of the discussions so far, however, is not that people may have different personal preferences, but that the terms of engagement in this debate are becoming clearer.
One striking aspect of so-called ‘daylight saving’ which is emerging, alongside the prime safety considerations, is its significance not only potentially for business efficiency, but also, even more crucially, for energy. It does begin to look very much as though more ‘summertime’ would keep energy consumption down.
Where’s the evidence?
A big surprise in all this is the paucity of serious publicly available evidence other than on safety (avoidance of accidents). It seems in some respects that the last substantial governmental research in this area was conducted in 1989.
That was now seventeen years ago. Since then, it need hardy be said, much has changed.
Business and technological practices are much different from those dismal years of two decades ago. Our consciousness of the energy crisis and of ecological issues is far better developed now than it was then. The public (electorate) is now far more aware of the issues of sustainability than they could possibly have been in the 1980s.
What’s the cost-benefit of ‘daylight saving’?
So where is the cost-benefit analysis of the different ways in wihich we might distribute the eternally pre-ordained number of daylight hours we have at our disposal, summer and winter? Common sense suggests that arranging things so there’s as much daylight as possible in the hours when most people can use it is a good start.
If anybody really knows the answer, please just let us know!
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled
BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)…..
Read the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
Investing In The U.K.’s Big Science And Medical Research
The U.K. Science and Innovation Framework 2004-2014 has taken on new significance with the recent Budget. Scientists, economists and the regeneration arm of government need to make common cause if the proposals to reshape particle physics (PPARC), medical research (MRC) and links between business and innovation are to achieve the promise which they appear in many ways to offer.
The Government, we gather, would like to elaborate its ten year plan for science, the Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014: Next Steps, by bringing together the Particle Physics and Astronomy Council (PPARC) and the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (CCLRC).
The proposal emerging from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Skills is that these two august bodies be merged as a new body, the Large Facilities Council (LFC). The LRC would have a budget of half a billion GBP a year for current CCLRC work and that part of PPARC’s work which concerns large investments. Other, grant awarding, parts of PPARC would merge with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
The physicists are not happy
It would be fair to say that this proposal has not been greeted enthusiastically by everyone in the science community. To quote one astronomy blog:
This move would place astronomy and particle physics research in direct competition with the rest of the physical sciences for money. I would expect this to mean that it will be harder to get a particular research project funded, as the competition for the limited funds is greatly increased. It will also mean that the new EPSRC will have to develop a plan / road-map for the whole of engineering, physics and astronomy; a pretty huge field. Can one funding council do this alone while maintaining the breadth and depth of research in the UK?
Nor perhaps are the medics
Another of the Next Steps proposals is that the Department of Health‘s research and development budget should be merged with that of the Medical Research Council to bring together all public research in health and medicine in the U.K, with a budget of some billion GBP. Inevitably, there will be questions asked about whether this size of investment can be feasibly managed. (There are possible parallels, not least in the particle physics world, where Cern‘s much admired Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is funded by 20 European states, using the talents of 6,400 scientists from all corners of the globe.)
The wider contexts
These ideas are not, however, developing in a vacuum. Side by side with the recasting of the budgetary alignments are proposals to set targets for increasing numbers of school students, and to increase business investment and involvement in research and development. These are difficult objectives to challenge, except perhaps in the sense that ‘more not less’ might be the cry.
It’s important to acknowledge all the levels at which these various concerns and considerations apply. There are fears for vulnerable / invisible research, there are fears about the status of academic institutions and research bodies, and there are the natural fears of scientists that their jobs maybe at risk. As we know from other change initiatives, these concerns cannot simply be dismissed.
Benefits of a new kind?
We should however try to factor in a number of newer perspectives as we consider these proposals. I have argued elsewhere that support for large-scale or ‘Big Science’ in the North West of England would have been easier to secure, had there not been a stand-off between those medical scientists funded by the NHS and those funded by other bodies.
The regeneration agenda does not, as of course Gordon Brown and his colleagues would argue, stand apart from the agenda for Big Science. The real challenge, however, is to manage the necessary transitions in a way which values and promotes the knowledge economy and those who work within it, rather than leaving them behind, bewildered and resentful about the proposals which are now emerging.
Never has there been a greater need, if we are all to benefit, for the scientists, the economists, the regeneration specialists and the politicians to talk amongst themselves. This, fundamentally, is what the current consultation period on Next Steps must be about.
The Clocks Go Forward … But Why, Back Again?
British Summer Time is welcomed by almost all of us – more daylight when we can use it is much appreciated, as Lord Tanlaw’s proposed ‘Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill’ acknowledges, for reasons of health, safety, energy savings and business benefit. So why do we need to revert to the darkness next Autumn? The answer appears to be historical drag, a reluctance to be ‘European’, and an obdurate insistence by some of national identity over common well-being.
Like 99% of the rest of the UK population, I’m really looking forward to the extra hour of evening light which will be ours as of this weekend. We may lose an hour of sleep just one Sunday morning, but then we get months of beautiful daylight at hours when we can actually enjoy them. It can’t come too soon.
It was always a huge puzzle to me why the ‘experiment’ to keep British Summer Time all year seemed to go so badly wrong when it was tried in 1968 to 1971. Then I learned that it was nothing to do with sensible allocation of daylight hours for nearly all of us – it was essentially a sop to the Scottish Highlands, where apparently people demanded the right to dark evenings for us all, so that they had a bit more daylight in the morning.
Why Highlanders couldn’t just adjust their working day a bit if they so like first light, is beyond me.
Safety – and Health – take a back seat
Since the missed opportunity of thirty five years ago, things have moved on. We now know about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and about the net increase in accidents – acknowledged in many countries – which wintry Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) brings in its wake – even for Scotland.
So there really is no excuse for any failure to support Lord Tanlaw’s current private Parliamentary Bill to adopt Single Double Summer Time (SDST) for an experimental three years from 29 October this year. The idea has the support of ROSPA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) and of PACTS (the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety) – who jointly last tried to effect such a change via Nigel Beard MP’s 10-minute bill in 2004. The previous time the change to all-year so-called ‘daylight saving’ was attempted before that was in 1994, with a Bill promoted by Nigel Waterson MP.
This debate has therefore now emerged as a matter of both safety and, equally importantly, health. The epidemiology of the proposed time shift suggests that it would not only reduce accidents, but also promote health; people would be more active in the winter, with beneficial effect to both physical and mental well-being.
My national identity before my health (and yours)?
The debate seems to boil down to two lines of argument:
Firstly, that it is the inalienable right of Scots people to conduct their morning farming activities in daylight – a ‘right’ which would be preserved in Lord Tanlaw’s bill, because it expressly accedes that the Scottish (and Ulster and Wales) Parliament/s could adopt current ‘winter time’ if they so determined; and
Secondly, that this is some sort of ‘European plot’, against farmers milkman and postal workers (…), foisting ‘non-British time’ on us – despite the additional difficulties which British ‘local’ winter time causes for companies seeking business across both Europe and wider afield. (It’s rather a surprise to learn in Hansard 8 Dec. 2004, Column 584W, that the Department of Trade and Industry has not conducted much research since 1989 (Cm 722) on potential economic and social effects of the ‘biannual time change’.)
Don’t play politics against common sense
Let us put aside the obvious issue that very few indeed of us live on farms (and that for many the sight of a postal worker before 10 a.m. – or a milkman at all – causes astonishment these days) and just focus on the facts.
Health and safety are what make our lives better. Not nationalities. And who wants his or her national identity to be seen as an obstacle to healthier and safer lives anyway?
~ ~ ~
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled
BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)….. Specific articles include:
Making The Most Of Daylight Saving: Research On British Summer Time
The Clocks Go Forward… And Back… And Forward…
SaveOurDaylight: Victor Keegan’s Pledge-Petition
British Summer Time Draws To A Close
Time Is Energy (And ‘Clocks Forward’ Daylight Uses Less)
Read the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
Big Changes In The NHS – But Where’s The Institutional Memory?
The NHS is experiencing another wave of ‘reconfiguration’, with a focus particularly on NHS Trusts and who runs them. But has there really been a shift from public sector thinking to the modern management of a complex part of the knowledge economy? On present evidence, opportunities to encapsulate hard-won insights into the organisational aspects of the health service are probably being lost.
The wholesale reconfiguration of the National Health Service, and particularly of Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, is now well underway. Public consultation finishes this week, and already some appointments are being progressed actively, albeit on a provisional basis.
This is probably not the place to go into the ins and outs of the basic argument – the bigger debate about the health economy is being conducted across the country and in Whitehall. What engages me more particularly is the essentially non-political issue of how much recognition is being given to the management of knowledge across this vast swathe of our public sector activity.
Is ‘institutional memory’ sufficiently acknowledged?
Whilst nealy all normal NHS employees are guaranteed jobs for a period following the intended reconfigurations, this arrangement does not extend to non-executive board positions. Indeed, the intention is now being taken forward to appoint new non-exec. posts not only through competition between existing post-holders, but with appointments being opened up to all comers – at a time when already many current non-executives will fall by the wayside anyway.
Yet non-executive directorships are the very roles which are intended to hold to account, and support, executive directors in their work. The risk is therefore that experience built up amongst non-execs. over the past few years since NHS Trusts have come into being is about to be lost, almost as soon as it has been developed.
This raises serious questions about how institutional memory and expertise amongst NHS non-executive directors is to be safeguarded. Where’s the knowledge management?
Public sector or significant knowledge economy?
Little visible effort seems so far been made to bring together in recognisable form all the aspects of high-level experience and skill which will take forward this current wave of NHS reconfiguration. Just as at last there is an emerging real understanding by non-executive directors of their crucial role, the chances are that it is to be lost again.
This is a quite separate issue from that of the general merits (or otherwise) of current moves to reshape the NHS. That debate is critical, but it is not the one we are addressing now. What we have here is a public sector health service which still sees itself as run on the basis of aspiration, rather than as a serious element of the knowledge economy, with all that implies for the management of skills, resources and the like. The preservation of institutional memory is a management, not a poltical, issue.
Introduce all the changes in structure that you wish, but alongside these must be a clear and formal recognition and management of the knowledge and skills, of themselves, within the health service. This is what modern management of complex organisations is fundamentally about, and it has to apply as much in the management of the health service as it does in any commercially-led set up.
Trying to bring (appropriate) ‘business’ attitudes into the health service is fine – though there are probably plenty of high-level people already there who have good ideas about this. But for success in the immediate future NHS organisations will need to protect and formalise their institutional knowledge right now; and the arrangements in place at present for moving on don’t make that easy.
Fire, Ice, Frost And Comets – A Lesson In Learning?
How we learn is always more complicated than we might imagine. The evocation of ‘fire and ice’ by both poet Robert Frost and, much later, NASA scientist Donald Brownlee, is an example to hand. Science and the arts alike depend for their impact ultimately on imagination and creativity, as well as rigour and formal insights.
Many years ago I was an American Field Service International Scholar, spending my senior high school year in Phoenix Arizona. This was a very ‘different’ experience to any I had had before or since, meeting an enormous range of people not normally encountered in suburban Birmingham England, my family home town at the time.
One of the enormous number of things I learned in Phoenix was the vast variety of interests to be found in a large American high school. And, drilling down from this, I came across a group of enthusiastic young people who Actually Read Poetry – and especially the poetry of Robert Frost, who was born on 26 March 1874 and died in 1963, not that long before I went to the States….. In a way we were perhaps a prototype Dead Poets Society, but with no sting in the tail.
A direct voice
Then a student of science, my knowledge of poetry at the time was (and sadly remains) pretty modest, but Robert Frost’s poems fascinated me. They are direct and elemental – qualities I do not enjoy in American classical music – but also somehow quizzical, which made them very challenging in a gentle sort of way; I was never sure quite what, apart from the pastoral or earthy images, they intended to evoke. And this was especially true of Frost’s Fire and Ice, which I learnt off by heart, and can indeed still quote:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
I subsequently discovered that there has been a huge amount of academic and also – engagingly – popular commentary on this poem, but at that time it simply drew me into a world away from the everyday, somewhere unknown and mysterious.
Where science meets art
Given the impression Fire and Ice had on me all those years ago, I was rather startled to read the BBC News online a few days ago, reporting Dr. Donald Brownlee, as chief scientist of the Nasa Stardust mission, on evidence that comets are ‘born of fire as well as ice’.
Immediately I was transported from a murky March day in Liverpool, back some decades past to the excitement of a group of young people in a sunny classroom in Phoenix Arizona, all seeking to understand the meanings, metaphorical and material, of the complex new world into which we were about to emerge as adults.
Frost had written of fire and ice as the future destruction of world; Brownlee spoke of the birth millennia ago of physical pieces of the universe; but the elements they referred to were the same. It seems fleetingly that we are back to the phlogiston philosophers, those earlier seekers after truth, but with an up-to-the-minute twist.
All ideas are creative
Here are modern observers interpreting their experience according to their different professional disciplines, each of them evoking, for me at any rate, striking and thought-provoking images. We all carry our own paradigms as the backdrop to our understandings, but explanations are worth little without imagination to bring them alive.
I may well have been studying science when I was in the States, but Robert Frost’s poems stayed with me at least as strongly as any of the factual lessons I learned.
It would be untrue to say the science left me icy, and the poetry set my imagination on fire. But without doubt in both instances the elemental images have been retained far more strongly than the formal educational input.
Survival Of The Fittest In The Marketplace, But Not For Life On Earth?
‘Survival of the fittest’ is often used to justify harsh business and other practices; but those who adopt this socio-economic position may also subscribe to ‘Creationist’ or ‘Intelligent Design’ notions about how life on earth has come about and diversified. This strange amalgum of beliefs arises from a lack of intellectual rigour which shows very clearly why Creationism should not become part of any serious school science curriculum.
It seems that Creationism is to be a feature of a new GCSE Biology curriculum in England. Whilst we have assurances that Creationism is not to be taught ‘as a subject’ I must admit to serious concerns about either Creationism or its close cousin, ‘Intelligent’ Design’ becoming part of the mainstream science curriculum.
General Studies can be a good place to discuss the ‘nature of science’ issues that arise from looking at Creationism or Intelligent Design, and maybe Religious Studies can offer perspectives on (non-)belief systems, but Science as a subject should probably not include subjects which are, quite simply, not subject to serious scientific scrutiny.
A conundrum of conflicting beliefs
One of the strangest things about the proponents of Intelligent Design and / or Creationism is that, for the most part, they have socio-economic beliefs which fit well within the Evolutionary Theory which they so strongly reject as an explanation of biological difference.
How can ‘survival of the fittest’ be seen to explain, and be acceptable, in terms of socio-political and economic / business affairs, but not biological ones?
Underlying this conundrum is perhaps a sense of preordination, that things are ‘given’ and cannot be changed on the whim of mere human beings; and this sense fits very helpfully into much of right-wing politics. But for those of us who respect the idea of science as a discipline and mode of knowledge, this is if anything completely the wrong way around.
Millennia to ‘change’ biology, but maybe minutes to change our own behaviour?
Living things change naturally over the millennia, ‘responding’ (i.e. surviving or not) to their contexts and inherent make up. This is a very long term and complex business.
On the other hand, human beings’ behaviour can, because we can perceive ourselves and reflect on what we do, change dramatically in the course of a single life time. ‘Intelligent Design’ is something we can all usefully engage in our own behaviour and outlook – not something which we need to dream up to ‘explain’ the amazing way in which the world as we know it has evolved over millions of years.
If survival of the fittest can be called upon by right wing thinkers to account for economic behaviour, they surely don’t have to devise other, quite undemonstrable, ‘explanations’ for the diversity of life on earth…. which leads me to wonder what less obvious reasons there may be for this strange conjunction of beliefs.
Regeneration Means Looking After What You’ve Got, As Well As What You Aim For
Plans for a future Mersey Tram are in tatters at the same time as the very real Mersey Ferry landing stage lies under water. More care for current assets and less dispute about proposals still on the drawing board might have served the Liverpool sub-region better. Regeneration is about looking after what we already have, even as we dream about the future.
Transport arrangements in Liverpool have been somewhat topsy turvey of late.
Am I the only person who wonders how we could be letting our main Passenger Ferry landing stage slip into the Mersey at the same time that we are making such a fuss about the ‘loss’ of the proposed Tram?
After five years of plans and plotting it seems the Trams are not to return to Liverpool, at least in the foreseeable future. This is obviously a blow to those who fought to see this mode of transport resurrected in the city, not least the Merseytravel team who had already invested heavily in track and the like for construction.
All was not as it seemed
But then we learnt that not everyone within the city council was enthusiastic about this idea. There are stories of counter-briefings and blame in high places.
And whilst this extraordinary tale was unfolding…. the Liverpool Pier Head landing stage fell into the Mersey River. And the Ferries had to be cancelled for the foreseeable future, all because of an ‘unexpected’ tide.
So not only will people from the starkly less advantaged east of Liverpool not get the rapid transport system which many insisted they had needed in order to develop work opportunities for the future, but also people who currently travel into Liverpool from Wirral to work (or vice versa) suddenly found their transport had, quite literally, been sunk.
Lessons worth learning?
There may be lessons here for everyone; and doubtless different people will conclude differently what these lessons are. But for me it’s this: Don’t let grand plans for the future ruin what’s OK about the present.
Too much of the regeneration agenda, in Liverpool and quite possibly elsewhere, is taken up with filling the front pages of the local papers with imaginative and very likely undeliverable ideas; but far too little of this agenda is concerned with nurturing what we have already, whether this be people or physical resources. The second, ‘nurturing’ option may be less dramatic than the ‘visionary’ first, but it’s equally important.
Visions for the future have produced a blinkered view of the present. Whilst Liverpool City Council, Merseytravel and others made plans and perhaps counterplans about the hugely expensive Tram, not much thought was, it seems, being giving to our already famous Ferries. And now we have neither. Perhaps, with a bit less posturing and a bit more thought, we could have had both.
No-Win Or Win-Win Gender And Babies Agenda?
Choosing if and when to have a baby has never been an easy decision, especially if both partners want to continue in employment. But the debate has shifted quite a lot in the past few years, and perhaps now a deeper understanding is emerging of what ‘work-life balance’ is really about.
Actually, of course, some folk would say it’s all-win for some, and never-win for others; but we do know, really, it’s not like that.
The question does however have to be asked, how can you get it right, if you’re a woman and a mum and a person who wants to make her way in the world?
History or Herstory?
Fact is, for the past fifty years it’s been even more complicated than for the years before then. Whatever is thought by those with shorter memories, the time from the end of World War II (1945) until the end of the sixties, and well into the seventies, was dreadful for women wanting to maintain their families and their careers.
The landmark equality legislation of the 1970’s certainly changed things for the better… but even I found myself in a situation, when ‘the family’ arrived, of having to resign my full-time post and then apply again for my job, as a part-timer. Maternity leave had never been taken by anyone at the college where I then taught, and anyway it was a mere four weeks or bust (which even after resigning was not much less than what I had, before I went back as a part-timer).
Strange then how, during WWII (I report here from the history books, not personal recollection), there was all sorts of support for ‘working women’, so it could be done when the will was there. But at that time of course, sadly, the men actually weren’t ‘there’ as well….
Improved, but still problematic
So I don’t go at all with the idea of some young women today that ‘it’s harder now than it was for our mums’ – who, it is I gather supposed, just had to work for ‘pin-money’, or else stayed at home supported by a bread-winning spouse who could earn for the family; for most of us I suspect that only happened on The Archers.
Nor of course do I believe that 1939-1945, with all its horrors, was a time when women always thrived. But classic films such as Rosie the Riveter (about a group of female engineering production workers in New York in the ’40s) demonstrate well the capability and willingness of women to take on ‘men’s jobs’ when they have to.
And nearer to home, I discovered in my own research in the 1970s that women who had entered academic science during the 1940s had a better chance of professional progression than younger ones, who had to compete with the men.
Complex judgements and issues
No, the issues now more complex than they were either when the need for skilled workers required women to take the job on, or indeed when the campaigns for basic rights (oh heady days!) were still to be won.
It’s rare for anyone today to announce their outright hostility to women – though there are many serious and shocking stories still to be told. The formal legal battles, if not the wage-related ones, have been quite largely secured. It’s beginning at last to cost those who don’t grasp equality a lot of money.
But that doesn’t resolve everything. We read daily of ‘reasons’ why women ‘should’ only have their children in a very narrow age-slot; and why they ‘must’ keep close physical contact with their babies for a considerable time. On a personal level these are harder things to deal with, than is straightforward sexist write-off. Psychological pressures can cause real personal pain; for fair-minded people sexism just causes anger.
Where’s the truth?
I don’t think there is a single truth in all this – except that no way is it ‘just’ a ‘women’s dilemma’. Whoever heard of a baby that didn’t have a dad somewhere along the line?
My recollection is that these psychological influences on decisions about having a family were always there, lurking in the scenes; but in previous decades we’ve had to concentrate on rights as such. Now young women (and their partners) have to make personal judgements, because genuine choice does at least to some extent exist.
It was never, ever, easy. But perhaps if real choices start to be made by women and men together, the climate might begin to change so that at least most folk understand and respect the dilemmas and decisions we all have to make, when we bring (or decide not to bring) babies into the world.
The expression ‘work-life balance‘ could be about to become genuinely meaningful at last.
A version of this article was first published in Diverse Liverpool: the gender issue, in March 2006, pp. 113-115.
Read more articles about Gender & Women, and see more of Hilary’s Publications, Lectures & Talks
Modern Civic Leadership Needs Gender Equity
Cities like Liverpool still seem to have a problem about ‘strong women’. On-going changes of civic leadership in the city offer an opportunity for the chaps to disprove suspicions that they continue to hold this antiquated attitude across all spheres of influence. Institutional sexism has no place in an adult and forward-looking city.
Recent turbulence in Liverpool’s civic leadership has set me thinking about what comes next. Do we want more of the same, or do we want something fresher and more responsive than the present arrangements?
This is a city with a tradition of behind-the-scenes chaps’ groups who met for luncheon and called themselves ‘The Big Four’ (or is it Super Six, or First Eleven, or Secret Seventeen?), and which has no, repeat no, really serious power-brokers outside Westminster who sometimes wear skirts. (There are some fine women out there doing excellent jobs, but they ain’t at the top of local government in Liverpool.)
Does Liverpool have a problem about women?
I’m certainly not of the view that women are necessarily ‘better’ than men in any respect, or that change necessarily means feminisation. But I do think, on the basis of many years’ experience, that this is a city which still has problems with welcoming the input of strong women. Maybe that’s not just a characteristic of Liverpool, but we are quite evidently trailing in the so-called Equal Opportunities stakes, as the Mersey Partnership Gender Agenda illustrates all too painfully.
Equality of opportunity is also best use of human resource
This isn’t just (though it is anyway) a matter of equity. This is a matter of the optimum use of resource, including talent, knowledge and understanding. In cities like Liverpool (I assume there are others too) problems seem to be ‘solved’ by top-down directives. Maybe that was necessary at one stage; but it won’t take us up to the next level – at least, not in my opinion a next level which in the long-run will do us any good.
Using human resources well means accommodating different styles and different perspectives. Even putting aside the compelling moral case, the fundamental reason that equal opportunities is critical is that any other way wastes potential to serve the best interests of everyone. (Has someone forgotten that over half the population is female?)
Sometimes men of influence are afraid of women who are strong
Men and women across the globe are in the end much the same; the variations within each gender are usually greater than the differences between the genders when it comes to work, decisions, personal choices and so forth. We (nearly) all want what’s best, we (nearly) all want decent, effective decision-making. So theoretically it doesn’t matter whether our leaders are men or women, as long as they’re able and of good faith.
But in one respect Liverpool at least hasn’t got there yet. The chaps who decide things – not all of them, but some – are not yet prepared to change their perceptions, to see individuals for what they can bring to the party, rather than what they wear (to be facetious, a skirt or a tie?). Whilst the city continues to be run by an unspoken convention about what sort of person is ‘appropriate’ for serious influence, leadership and decision-making – and challenge as you may, demonstrating this convention isn’t the case is very difficult – we are desperately missing a trick.
Influence and leadership across the board
Covert sexism in Liverpool applies whether we’re looking at the Town Hall, the local economy or community development and involvement. There is an inflexibility somewhere in ‘the system’ which results I suspect from insecurity and / or protectionism masquerading as traditional, definitive leadership. And this overall leadership, as we have seen, is hugely male-dominated.
Current civic changes offer a chance for those decision-makers who really do care about the best interests of us all now to deliver something more inclusive and thereby also more effective for the whole community.
We shall be a Grown Up City when, and only when, the Chaps are no longer afraid of Strong Women.
Whatever Is The ‘Health Economy’?
The ‘health economy’ is much discussed but little defined idea. Within local health-care provision it carries an assumed status which it is perhaps now time to challenge. We don’t in everyday parlance between managers talk of an ‘education economy’; so why a ‘health economy’? Many of us would defend very strongly the concept of essential health care free at the point of delivery, but the idea of a closed specialist health economy may not be the best strategic vehicle to ensure delivery of such modern, responsive and effective health care.
There’s a fair amount of excitement around the changes in the National Health Service these days. Big shifts are about to occur in the shape, goegraphical and structural, of Primary Care Trusts, Stratgeic Health Authorities and much else. And in amongst all the other deliberations there is much reference to the ‘health economy’.
What is the ‘health economy’?
Now is probably not the best time to go into the pluses and minuses of the strategic plans for the various strands of the NHS; feelings are running high and there’s a lot to sort out yet. But it may well be a good time to ask, just what is the ‘health economy’?
This is a very particular notion, and possibly not a very helpful one. In the U.K. at least it seems mostly to refer the range of business and economic activities which fall within the scope of government-led medical attention. Nonetheless, it is by no means as easy as one might imagine to find a definition of what the health economy actually is, as opposed to simply references to it in the contexts of other health-related activity. ‘Health professions’, ‘health care’ or ‘health economics’, yes, there are many formal references and links; but ‘health economy’…. if you know of a good weblink or text book, please tell us!
A constraining concept
Perhaps it’s time to stop using this term at all. With the newer ways of delivering health care (even though this is still more likely to be ‘illness and medical care’, rather than ‘well-being and health promotion care’) the interface between different types of providers is becoming more blurred. The intention of the NHS to provide essential care free at the point of delivery remains, whoever is giving it, but the economic links are of necessity becoming far more complex.
New opportunities
There are many ways in which a more fluid concept of health-related activity might widen the scope for responsive delivery. We don’t hear about the ‘education economy’, ‘arts economy’ or ‘science economy’ as every day notions; they’re all part of, for instance, a much bigger knowledge economy. Perhaps less talk of the ‘health economy’ will open up more visible opportunities for local social enterprise and business engagement in flexible and client-responsive health care provision; and that in turn may perhaps also help local investment and regeneration in a much broader way.
Dreaming Realist 