Saturday, October 16, 2010

Quiet as a Church Mouse - Speaking in Public

Having been to our local Lib Dem AGM mini-conference today I was asked to give a little report about the recent Autumn Conference with a couple other of my fellow Nottingham Lib Demmers.

A few years ago I was at a induction session for Junior Doctors with a few Consultants present. I used to get extremely nervous talking to a group of people until one particular session when someone spoke before me who came across very poorly because of her extreme nervousness. I felt sorry for her as when not in these inductions she didn't come across this way. Having heard this though I was grateful that suddenly after thinking to myself "I'm not like that am I when I talk?" my "bad" nerves about speaking in front of these people disappeared.

I couldn't beleive it and I've not felt that nervous since.

My BIG problem is that I have been told repeatedly that I talk very quietly.

I think this stems from the fact that my eye sight is poor so, as they say, my hearing has compensated and my hearing is very acute. This makes my speech sound very loud to me but to everyone else barely audible.

Fortunately today I think people heard me as they at least laughed in the right places but I do have a tendancy to slip back to my normal volume after trying to talk louder at the beginning.

Is the solution to stick some earplugs? :-)

Do I then come across as loud and obnoxious?

I may try it one time in front of people I know.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Stupid Targets

We had a meeting this morning regarding a government issued questionnaire given to patients having certain operations and their experience before and 6 months after.

This started last April and we were told "It won't have much work involved but ask the patients if they would fill the booklet in, consent and then they would be sent another follow up form in 6 months". Yeah right.

We find out that the Trust has a return rate of 19% for these forms which isn't great but I worked out our returns at about 64% so was reasonably pleased but I'm sure we could do better. We went to the meeting to find the return rate target is 100%.

We have to try and "convince" every patient to complete the booklet. It is not an essential piece of hospital paper, and trust me there are plenty of them, and we have had patients refuse to fill them in.

This means that the 100% target for a reasonable size hospital and the volume of flow through of patients means someone is going to say no. That means we instantly fail. Where is the motivation in that. We have also been told that if a hospital doesn't obtain 100% they are financial penalised. More paper chasing, pen pusher, target driven government failure instead of treating people and valuing their choices they are data to be collected.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Constance Street, New Basford

I have just been delivering some Liberal Democrat leaflets to Constance Street in New Basford.

Last time I was there I noticed a peice of land sold with planning permission to build a 4 bedroom house that had a significant amount of fly-tipping on it. I reported this to the lady at Nottingham City Council investigating this sort of activity to which I received an email saying she had visited the site and follow it up.

She must have got in touch with the land owner and either one of them has done a good job in clearing the rubbish away and replacing the protective fence. The land looks a lot better for all around. Well done whoever did it.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Nottingham City Recycling

I bike to work every morning. Always the same way so I can usually get to work without thinking too much about the bike ride itself.

Unfortunately sometimes this leaves me time to look around at the surroundings. This morning in our area it was household general waste collection (green bin). There are four of us in our house and I'm amazed how heavy the bin is but at least the lid is always closed.

On the way to work this morning I noticed a bin overflowing with a lid almost vertical but what really gets my goat is the fact that one of the bags on top was full of drinks cans. Really annoying. As much as this City doesn't get right there are large parts that do have access to the brown/grey household collection recycling bin. What else was in the bin that could have been recycled?

Cans are perfectly acceptable in the recycle bin and you don't have to take it anywhere other than the street on collection day.

It does tend to make me seeth that this facility is there freely provided by the City Council and a few people have the arrogance not to do just the smallest little bit.

I hoping that the binmen report it to their supervisors so that these people receive the correct education material to help them mend there ways.

Hopefully printed on recycled paper. :-)