For the next hour or so I’m going to be in Second Life here, watching the Turkish eclipse on live cast.

Until then, can anyone suggest a way to keep two Outlook email clients in sync, similar to the way I can have my emails shared between my home computer and my Pocket PC by using Activesync?

Preferably without spending huge sums of cash on and Exchange server.

NHSBlogDoc reports on Geek Nurse taking down their blog.

Owing to concerns raised by staff and management, GN's archive has been removed from public display. Thank you to all those that took part.

After the recent trouble with the police bloggers, and now this - I'm not only feeling a bit nervous, but am starting to get the urge to 'do something'.

Who'll be next I wonder?

There is a bit of a kerfuffle in London at the moment about the failure of communication during the July 7th bombings.  In November one of our top management people told the review committee that our radios “worked well”.  This is being reported on as a misrepresentation.  While I don’t have any ‘inside information’ I can tell you that the communication gear supplied to us is inadequate.

And it’s the government’s fault.

Currently our communication equipment is -

a) A VHF radio installed in each ambulance/RRU

b) An ‘emergency’ mobile phone.

c) Managers and other important people have pagers.

The pagers are, as I understand it, in direct response to the July bombings – our managers became unreachable after the mobile phone networks were ‘switched off’.  We were quite lucky that a whole bunch of our managers were at a meeting in Milwall – and so large numbers of them could be contacted.

We used to have hand-held radios, but almost all of them have disappeared.  They were seldom in a good working order, the reception was awful, the battery life was crap and they weighed a ton.  They were so heavy that, should I be assaulted, I’d be better off using it as a weapon rather than trying to call for help.

Our mobile phones are also fairly useless – they are locked so you can only call certain numbers and because of the lack of staff up in Control you can be waiting a long time for the phone to be answered.  They are also pretty poor at getting a signal – they don’t like tunnels.  Or walls.

So – quite rightly – we will be getting a brand new system that will be integrated with other emergency services.  It is spanking new and apparently much better (although there have been some concerns about possible health risks, although others play such risks down.)

The problem (besides the chance of getting tumours) is that we will only be getting this system in 2008, this is of course, hoping that a government I.T. plan goes to plan – which, given recent schemes which have gone five times over budget, is highly unlikely.

I’m guessing that effective radios for ambulances is a pretty low priority given the financial state of a lot of NHS trusts.  Most of this problem is due to the unexpectedly high cost of Agenda for Change (40% of the extra money earmarked for the NHS) - it has gotten so bad that at least one hospital is making 1 in 7 staff redundant (because we obviously need less nurses, not more).  Although, at the risk of sounding like NHSblogdoc, the blessed Patricia Hewitt is blaming ‘bad management’.

We can only work with the money that the government gives us - there is no way we can ‘turn a profit’ on ambulance work – especially as we seem to be doing more and more community work for no additional funds.

So – communication failure has little to do with the LAS, and all to do with the money the government gives us.

(And this is after the government screwed EMTs over Agenda for Change bandings in order to give us as little money as possible)

One of the curses of working shift work is that you can find yourself watching the dreaded "Daytime TV". At the moment the TV is on GMTV. One of their regular slots is all about 'food allergies'. Now for me (as a medical professional) and allergy is a severe reaction to a stimulus. What these people on the TV are talking about is a sensitivity.

So, as I'm a bit bored, I decided to take their online test to see if I have any food allergies.

"It’s pretty much guaranteed that you have an allergy"

Why is this so? Because I'm often tired (Duh! I work shifts), that I sometimes feel bloated and sleepy after eating (Isn't that the point), I sometimes get aches and pains (who doesn't? I'm carrying people all day), and that while I sometimes feel depressed I often feel better when I go on holiday (How many people don't feel better during a holiday?).

This seems like a fine example of quackery. An allergy/intolerance is diagnosed after a skin tolerance test, not from fourteen yes/no questions. People who take this questionnaire might think that a more serious condition is likely to be a 'food allergy'.

Black Triangle is excellent at shining a light on these sorts of things and is one of my daily required readings (When I'm not stuck on 12 hour shifts that is...)

He's also posted a reasoned post about the recent critical illness of participants in a clinical drug trial. I would add to his post that the drugs that doctors are using to try and save the participant's lives would all have gone through the same clinical trials as the test drug that may have caused this reaction.

For the radio piece that this is based on, you can listen to it here until Saturday.  (Clip generated by the very clever Adrian McEwen with his genius McQN.net Real Audio Clip Generator).

The BBC website has a story about it here as well. (Thanks Batsgirl).

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World Weary Detective recently stopped blogging in response to a memo from the Metropolitan Police Force (‘The Met’).  He reports,

This statement is followed by 'guidance' on writing blogs. In summary, this states that although 'blogging' cannot be stopped, the 'impact of expressing views and opinions that are damaging to the organisation or bring the organisation into disrepute' must be considered. Disciplinary proceedings may be considered against posters of material that may be (among other things) defamatory, offensive or otherwise inappropriate.

You can read the whole memo here.

So far, according to Technorati, there are 71 posts linking to this story.  Due to work (and other) commitments I’ve not been able to comment until now.

My initial thought on the majority of the memo is that it is fine advice.  Police bloggers are reminded that they should not ‘defame’ people (which is illegal anyway), and that they should not bring the police into ‘disrepute’.  Bringing the service into disrepute would be a disciplinary offence in pretty much any employment.  You can ‘whistleblow’, but you can’t bring into disrepute.

Then we move on to ‘offensive’.  One man’s ‘offense’ is another man’s ‘joke’.  It’s a bit tricky to determine what is offensive and to whom, in fact the government can’t get a law through that outlaws religious offense.

Finally, and for me the crucial point, is the part that says ‘or otherwise inappropriate’.

What is that supposed to mean?  Is it ‘inappropriate’ to speak out about the flaws in the proposed ID card?  Would it be ‘inappropriate’ to write a satire?  Would it be ‘inappropriate’ to write the truth about ‘binge drinking’?  Actually – would it be considered ‘inappropriate’ to write about the memo that has started this whole trouble?

While I might admire the Met for considering a blogging policy, they have unfortunately made a complete balls-up of it.  They have, instead of clarifying points, only made the police bloggers unsure of what they can write about.  With this lack of firm guidance many have decided that blogging in the police is simply too dangerous for your career.  Police bloggers have all shown amazing common-sense in the things that they blog about.  They have not mentioned anything that could breach confidentiality, nor have they compromised any on-going investigations.  There has been no defamation, racism, sexism or other subject that could bring the police into disrepute. 

What police bloggers have done is to show us that they are individual human beings.  They have proven that behind the uniform is someone who thinks about what their management tells them, that they too have their own ideas on politics, crime, religion and class and that the police come from a whole spectrum of people.  You have right-wing police bloggers, and bloggers who probably have a subscription to ‘Socialist Worker’.  They have all behaved with the professionalism that would be expected of them.  And yet the Met do not trust their workers.

Blogging is the great humanizer.

The Met are scared that the voice of one person will bring down their anti-crime policies.  I think that Stan Hill sums it up best when he says,

It is sad that the senior officers at the Met don't seem to have confidence in their decision making and policy making abilities. Were they sure of their ground, then the "challenge" posed by some blog articles would be easily dispelled.

Finally, and perhaps more frighteningly – the Met management have given us a glimpse into what it must be like to work for them.  That you would be scared that ‘otherwise inappropriate’ could be used to discipline you.  That you are expected to toe the company line in all ways and that you dare not show any signs of individuality.

In purely Public Relations terms, what the police bloggers have built - the Met has demolished in one easy step.

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(I would have liked to have spent more time on this – I’d liked to have done more than one draft, but the radio slot is time limited.  My apologies if this seems a little poor, but I have been working twelve hour shifts).

For those that are interested in such things – I’m talking to Brian Hayes on Radio 5 Live later tonight about ‘Employee Blogging’, mainly about how I believe that the management of the Metropolitan Police have made a huge balls-up in scaring off their police bloggers.  I should be on the show just after 11pm.

There is a bigger post about this issue in the pipeline.