AS SUMMER draws to a close, householders aren’t the only ones dreading oversized winter fuel bills: one NHS trust is cutting jobs to cope with rising energy prices. Despite having already cut 150 posts to save £7 million, Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust is poised to lose another 100 posts. The additional £2.5 million is needed to cover large increases in energy costs, Nursing Times (Sept 5) reports. Unsurprisingly, unions aren’t happy about the situation. Colin Beacock, the Royal College of Nursing policy adviser, says in NT that “we have reached a bad situation when a lack of planning for energy costs can impact on the workforce”.
While nurses in Essex are worrying about the winter, environmental health officers are being told to fight crime, not cockroaches. At their annual conference, officers were told that they were failing to engage with the Government’s crime-reduction agenda, reports Environmental Health News (Sept 8). “Your colleagues in housing and social services have been much quicker,” Richard Samuel, the chief executive of Thanet Council, told delegates. He said that crime reduction — in relation to fly-tipping and litter — should be just as important as food inspection and pollution control.
It’s hard to get the balance right on matters of gender politics and boys and young men are missing out on consultation exercises, according to research carried out for the organisation Working with Men. “We now have a way of working that purports to be gender neutral but it is actually not,” says Simon Forrest, a consultant for Working with Men, in Young People Now (Sept 6). He adds that talking-based work tends to be more effective with women and girls whereas men respond better to specific incentives. More needs to be done by councils and voluntary organisations, he says, to ensure that young men’s voices are heard.
The needs of elderly prisoners also tend to be sidelined, says Community Care (Sept 7) in a report that provides some grim statistics. Those over the age of 60 are a fast growing group of prisoners, and even if they don’t die in jail they face greater problems than most prisoners when they are released and they are often left “bewildered and frustrated” by the resettlement process. Health issues are an additional concern because 85 per cent of those over 60 have one or more major illnesses noted in their medical records. Young inmates dominate the prison agenda, Geoff Dobson, of the Prison Reform Trust, says: “In prisons with a high proportion of young males there’s an awful lot of testosterone about. So you get some older prisoners feeling intimidated.”
New thinking is, quite literally, also needed in higher education because there are “many mismatches between how universities teach and how the brain learns”. We know that active learning is much more powerful than passive learning, but the lecture still predominates in universities. “Too often we fall victim to the fallacy that we can impart knowledge and cognitive skill by simply describing or explaining things,” says Jamshed Bharucha in The Times Higher Education Supplement (Sept 8). Looks as if it’s time to get active with thinking, then.