Weekly Independent

HCA: A Private Alternative?

Private healthcare is becoming less and less of a dream in the UK and more of a reality as the government makes yet more changes to the NHS.  HCA hospitals are one group who have been making increased investments in patient care and facilities offering in many cases more attractive treatment alternatives.  The question is, are they a viable alternative to the NHS?

HCA History

Suspicion of private medical care has always been rife in the UK mostly because it remains one of the few countries in the world with a functioning and (so far) viable national healthcare provision for the populace.  The NHS is envied and cited as a shining example over what other healthcare systems should strive to achieve.  Yet the private sector has proven to work well as a viable alternative when the NHS is unable to cope with demand. More

Demand for Paperless NHS Highlights Challenge Faced By Many

With the news that NHS trusts have been given a target to hold all patient records electronically by 2014, data management and integrated IT systems have become a hot topic for both small and large businesses.

Why has there been an increased focus on data management?

The move to paperless filing has been the key goal for most major companies for at least the past decade and for good reason.  Records and data are routinely misfiled and in many cases simply lost.  Whilst the loss of some records such as sporting data from a snooker tournament may seem trivial, the loss of NHS patient records is not.  Key medical information on a cancer sufferer can literally mean the difference between life and death.  The increase in population has meant an increase in the amount of filing and data that needs to be kept.  Paper systems are simply no longer a viable option due to the time and possibility of mistakes being made. More

Business Credit Cards Teach Discipline

How to run a business is a subject that should be taught at school, especially as the government expects the small business man and woman to lead the country out of our current economic difficulties. However many of us who want to go it alone don’t have the basic financial skills necessary and this is something that effects our personal finances as well. Starting my own business was nerve racking, as I’m sure it is for everyone who ventures down that road. It’s not enough to have a great idea and provide the best service possible to your customers, you also have to get your head around the financial management of the organisation and above all get on top of the thorny matter of cash flow.

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Payday Loans – Who Should Decide?

A brief response to an earlier entry regarding payday loans – critics argue that the government should step in to control lenders, but I have to say that when I apply for a financial service I want it to be the lender that makes the decisions, not the suits behind the scenes. If the authorities become too involved, who decides which applicants are eligible? Who decides the rates of interest etc? Who do we complain to in cases of complaint?Truth is, this is one area of the financial world that needs simplifying – not convoluting by big brother.

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The impact of the European debt crisis

The European debt crisis has been raging on since 2009. Some experts feel that this crisis was a continuation of America’s debt problems. Other experts feel that it started off with a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, where the government found itself in huge debt. Greece had managed to raise capital on the guarantee that it was part of the Eurozone, and hence had implied creditworthiness.

However, Greece was (and still is) in no position to pay back the debt. Before the crisis began, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain had ambitious growth plans as well. These plans, too, were funded by external parties who found that these countries had low interest rates. Moreover, it appears that these countries were far too bullish about their immediate future, and most growth plans collapsed when they were actually implemented.

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Some sensible news from UK politicians: enforce greater control on companies offering payday loans

Payday loans have been widely criticised in the UK for targeting certain groups of people, particularly individuals who have a poor credit history due to large debts. These are exactly the kind of people that, when given the opportunity to receive these loans, fail to pay them back in time because they don’t take responsibility for their personal finances. The UK Government is demanding new policies to prevent these high street firms from taking advantage of vulnerable individuals.

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SOPA to affect the future of the internet

If you are unaware of SOPA, which is the Stop Online Piracy Act, then it is about time you looked into it, as it is something that could change the course of the way we use the internet, forever. The act is going to vote in the USA, and if passed, will cause a full scale change in the law, allowing the government of America powers to shut down, without warning, or grounds for appeal, any website contravening copyright laws.

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Rents Now Unaffordable

The housing charity Shelter has conducted a special research about the costs and the prices of renting a property. It has found some peculiar trends and has observed some quite disturbing facts about the current housing policy of private rentals that circulates unofficially within the industry. Amusingly, now not even a Spinal Cord Injury compensation, for people that have undergone an accident due to the negligence of the employer, would be a financial injection strong enough to satisfy the demand for finances in the housing sector for a single person.

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Twenty Years Later

Twenty years ago Russia celebrated the fall of the communist regime – it was achieved hard, with the support of the ordinary people, with the participation of soldiers who threw the red barrettes and joined the public, with the death of patriots who wanted something better for their country. This is how the heroes of modern Russia were born, but this is also the time when they died simply because nowadays Russia struggles to call itself democratic and its people live in the dust of ruthless rulers and oligarchs.

The first democratically elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, would now be quite unhappy with what political power turned his country into. The federation is no longer democratic and it has been such probably only for a year. The wealth is equally distributed among powerful figures, the political players stay the same for almost a decade and a half changing the laws to accommodate their own political and financial needs and to address their decreasing liabilities. Russian banks have long gone passed corporate finance and business loans – they now house the financial resource of a corrupted country.

So the question that begs answering is whether there has been actually been any change in the governance and the attitude of the Russian political elite towards democracy since the fall of the Soviet regime. The answer might be well composed essay of a few thousand words with millions of references. But we can put it simply into a sentence – the Russian federation inherited all the weakness of the Soviet regime and the names of the heroes that broke its chains are forgotten – simply because a brand new chains suffocate the Russian country.

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Famine Problems

Famine is the easily described as poverty. However, this might appear to be wrong. According to the standards of delivering meaning in the English language, poverty means the lack of a necessity and not absolute starvation. This is why we would now use famine as ’absolute starvation'- the starvation that even animals do not experience.

This is, however, a true situation in Eastern Africa. The Economist has drawn a graphic that indicates the famine levels in troubled Easter African countries. The leadership is held by Somalia that has over 3,6 million people from its 7,5 million population that lack not only necessities but are also starving. Ethiopia is another story with almost 10% of its population starving. Kenya is gradually improving but even there the problems continue to persist and a lot of people lack any source of nutrition.

The reason according to the Economist is a complex mixture of several negative factors. And this has nothing to do with the primary teaching jobs – no matter how much we claim education is the problem in these countries, it appears that social understandings, international negligence and nature problems are the main sources of the spread of famine.

The rainfalls in these countries would be insufficient in regions of grossly exceeding the normal levels in others. This brings along agricultural disaster that would deprive millions from a meal a day. Furthermore, the civil conflicts in the country continue to rage whereas international organizations seem to be showing no understanding. More than half of Somalia is now on the edge of a food crisis and more than 50 billion dollars would be necessary for the countries in Eastern Africa to obtain nutrition for their people in 2011.

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