GPs are wanting to suspend their appraisals. Quite frankly I think it is even more important that they should have appraisals at the moment. They have been complaining about appraisals for a while and they have now raised a petition. Pretty well everyone else has appraisals in their jobs, I have never understood why the GPs think they are so good they don’t need any checks. This is what they are saying:
“As an NHS GP, I’m worried that we are not doing enough to protect the country from the global COVID-19 coronavirus. There are a number of steps the Government should undertake immediately to help slow the spread of the virus in the UK.
1. Suspend time-consuming reviews (appraisal and revalidation) for NHS doctors until the emergency is over in order to free up our time to attend to the sick and reduce the effects of the virus on public health and wider society.”
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piglette
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I agree the governments are not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus.In Canada there is a lack of supplies and ppl are actually stealing them.They are saying 80% of the world will have the virus.Why are all countries still allowing so much travel?So scary with all the media i am going to stop watching the news.
How many people are actually hospitalised with covid19 in Canada? I can't seem to find the number. Were supplies being stolen from hospitals?
We have the luxury here of time to prepare for the onslaught as so far no cases in Atlantic Canada (as of this minute anyway). They have set up numerous testing stations separate from hospital emergency departments which I think is sensible, and ppl are being told to phone 811 ahead of time if they feel they need to go to one of those centres.
I suppose we won't really need to be concerned about the cruise ships which normally come as the bottom is dropping out of the cruise industry as we speak. Last year over 300,000 passengers visited Halifax via cruise ships. 😲
In Ontario we have just begun with cases.Of course its going to get worse.once it gets into community transmission.My son lives in New Brunswick so luckily it hasn t got to the east yet.Iam in Hamilton and our 1st cases have appeared.They say 80%of Canadians will get it.Scary but we can't live in a bubble.
I sincerely hope this is not going to happen. With a 3% death rate there could be close to 900,000 deaths, right? Where did the 80% figure come from? If we are going to get it anyway, why bother with all the measures to prevent it spreading?
Merkel said 58m people in Germany would be effected, but a virologist who advised them previously estimated 40,000....its anyone's guess but people just need to be sensible. I am a realistic fatalistic optimist about such things if such a thing is possible.
In an effort to prevent the healthcare services not being overwhelmed - instead of a spike with loads of people needing HDU beds all at once, preventing other cases like RTCs or emergency surgery being able to be cared for, you aim for a lower peak that doesn;t result in 100% bed occupancy spread over a longer time period.
The death rate figures are probably too high because they aren't based on the real numbers of cases as a lot aren't being recognised. But 1% of a very large number is still a large number. Yes, 80% just have a cold - but of the other 20% a quarter will become seriously ill, and not only oldies like us. In Meran at present there are 3 cases in ICU: one young, one middle aged and one old.
Well that's the thing. I want to know as much as possible. I'm very pleased to see the measures being taken in Nova Scotia so the medical system has all its ducks in a row before the storm hits, but speculation about how many people will get ill seems to be a step too far in what I want and need to hear! Especially when the figure makes it look like all the efforts we are making are useless.
Just wanted to let you know here in Ontario ppl are going crazy stock piling.Line ups out the door.So i wanted you to stock up before this craziness gets to the east.
Why don't they just shut up about percentages and numbers, all predictions and might not come to fruition. Everyday we are bombarded with doom and gloom
Different strokes for different folks. I actually find it more reassuring to know as much as possible and not leaving things to my imagination.
But it does give one pause to realize that nearly everyone is going to catch it eventually. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be as deadly as some of the other recent scary diseases, just more transmissible.
As of March 11 at 3:57pm (est) there are 102 cases in Canada...41 in Ontario, 39 in British Columbia, 14 in Alberta, 7 in Quebec.
I am aware of cases in Kitchener, Hamilton, Mississauga, Toronto and Sudbury, and other locations within the province. 5 cases have been resolved.
None are considered “community transmission” but the assistant chief medical officer of health says Ontario can expect those type of cases in the future.
I live an hour from Hamilton and Kitchener in a rural town, but we have not experienced any panic buying of supplies.
Our Prime Minister has announced today a $1 billion response fund including $50 million in international aid to help other countries fight the spread of the virus.
These are the first detailed articles I’ve read/watched so that I can remain informed as I have travel planned in the next week. Beyond this I’ll likely choose to continue to limit the incoming information as to not cause myself stress/worry. It’s a delicate balance trying to stay abreast of the changing situation, and not becoming overwhelmed and panicking.
Surely the could have left it on behind closed doors , in fact I would love this situation to have an unexpectedly positive effect; on the environment.
If more events continued at the moment behind closed doors everywhere but got televised and we all saw how good just staying home to watch it could be we could bring in a new system were no events had crowds but we could all see them ( even at a nominal cost ) without having 1000's of people travelling worldwide each year to attend them. Plus , no more wasted products in promotional materials and one time use posters and programmes etc.
Offices could finally be forced to use technology properly to hold meetings between different areas and still get the work done seeing its success on a regular basis , and workers could prove they could be trusted to work at home and still be productive. No more business travel , endless car journeys with one single traveller and no commuting.
People would still go to hotels and restaurants but for the fun and relaxation of it .
You would be bringing in people from around the world, including their teams (coaches, physios, etc) and frankly I think that is a bad idea right now. There was a conference somewhere in Canada a short while ago and now there are what they call "local transmission" cases which can be traced back to the conference, but not the actual source person or people. Avoiding crowds is one of the key means to prevent out of control exponential increase in cases which overwhelms already overstretched health care systems.
To be honest I am very reassured by the reaction of our system, from the federal health minister to our provincial senior health officer to the communication I got from our property manager today outlining the steps they will take to keep our public areas sanitized and what we can do to help ourselves to prepare for the disease to arrive here.
The NBA (basketball) has just suspended the rest of this season as they have discovered a couple of players on one team have tested positive.
I do feel sorry for athletes who've trained for years to get to the event planned for this year. I feel sorry for people who worked hard to organize school trips, or planned their trip of a lifetime, or were going to go to an important conference. But in the big picture none of those things really matter. Once things settle down, once the world has a handle on the outbreak, once effective vaccination is available, and maybe it will take a couple of years, at that point we can pick up the threads of those events which seemed so important. But this is actually about saving lives. Not just the lives of the ~2% who will die of covid19, but also those who might not be able to access care for other life-threatening conditions if the health care systems are overwhelmed.
Actually , knowing how important it is as an athlete to take part in competitions in the run up to a big event I think they should probably have the foresight to reschedule the Olympics later in the year now , and stop messing about with it.
The athletes won't be at peak performance because of lost competitions so the essence of putting the best against of the best will have gone.
I think it is one of the hotspots, after BC. Ontario has nearly as many cases as BC, concentrated in Toronto, as I suppose one would expect. Both locations have as I write fewer than 50 cases each.
I live in Toronto, and my kids are begging me to visit my brother who lives in a small town outside of Ottawa. The Ontario govt is going to close schools here for 2 weeks after the March break. Like HeronNS, we have certain hospitals we can go to if you think you have CV and they each have designated doors and areas.
If you can, don't touch anyone, and wash your hands, and ostentatiously use hand sanitizer, and offer to squirt your neighbour's hands, and don't touch your face!!!
Actually cruise ship numbers do not console us at all as we are a major cruise destination. Over 300,000 passengers passed through Halifax last year, mostly in September and October, also throughout the summer.
This is a fascinating article. Long, but worth reading. Note that the virus is being best controlled in countries which learned lessons during SARS (which was far deadlier but didn't spread the same way):
The trouble is the article assumes that we have correct information on the actual number of Covid-19 cases. The UK is not really testing very widely while South Korea is. In fact our Health Minister has just been diagnosed and has been wandering around parliament, but our MPs are refusing to be tested, I bet there are other MPs with the virus but we may never know if it is mild, while they give it to everyone else.
I don't think it does - he presents a model for extrapolating on the figures we have, assuming that the numbers we are told are extremely optimistic (to put it mildly).
I think maybe stopping watching the news is a good thing. I saw all kinds of reports of supermarkets running out of everything... A usually "reliable" news outlet showed pictures of empty shelves in my city. I had visited several supermarkets that day and they were full of paper stock, soap, cleaning products food, fresh fruit and veg etc. And I didn't see anyone bulk buying. Sometimes a story is just a story.
We have a lot of empty shelves in our supermarkets in U.K. The shelves that are still full are the ones for Vegan foods and 'Free 'From' foods. Perhaps this a clever way of getting us all to become plant based eaters.
😂🤣😂 In the past week I have called at different smarkets just to see. No empty shelves in any of the. In fact one was offering 12 packs of beans and to soup. I got the dog her treats of human fishy stuff
.. Full. But as a veggie of 30yrs, 8 of that as vegan.... It gets right on my nerves that there all this "plant based," foods generally, and that just look like meat. I don't really want that. Quorn is something it took years for me to get used to and they have gone beefy too. Yuk for me.
Totally agree, why make everything look like meat, just say what it is, it is just as nutritious, probably more so after they have fiddled about making it look like a sausage roll and adding all sorts of things to it.
Well this is probably not the time for a panel to be sitting in a closed room having a meeting about something that's not as urgent as the immediate crisis.
Fortunately, we have email, chat services, phones for teleconferences and Skype if a visual is necessary.
Otherwise, these reviews can be suspended unless someone needs to be reprimanded for not observing contagion protocols.
We will all have to set aside our personal priorities in service to the greater good for some time forward, unless the incident in question poses a danger to the wider community in the immediate circumstances. I'm certainly not suggesting that we can ignore incompetence, but some things are just not going to be a priority for quite a while, and may actually be put aside altogether, as we work through this and then get to complete recovery.
Still stands... As long as they are not forgotten thereafter. I don't want them in a room getting sick but there needs to be some sort of quality assurance once some sort of normality returns.
Ah! So they are using Covid 19 as yet another excuse for getting out of being appropriately supervised in their work are they , they'll try anything to get out of being pulled up on bad habits and poor practise won't they!
Keep trying Docs! Of course , in this instance they may get a temporary reprieve for a few months but they'd be fooling themselves if they thought it would be anything more than temporary.
The Government has had too much trouble over the last decade from not doing proper diligence in checking Hospitals and GPs and not seeing negligence on a systemic level. They won't want another scandal so they won't let them off for long. Politicians are better at covering their own botties than Doctors are 😋
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NY Times article on PMR. 
Having a tough time at present.
I just want to quit GCA! 
My latest six-month review with a (2nd) locum.
