Monday 12 October 2009

nanny makes a bad nurse

occasionally I'm stunned at the machinery of bureaucracy, despite me being experienced with it. I read this article today about a British IRAQ war veteran who died after getting a set of lungs in a transplant operation which came from a heavy smoker and had cancer.

To make matters worse it seems that the hospital which put the cancerous lungs into him then wouldn't give him another set because the hospital procedures preclude providing service to people who were smokers ... presumably they got this from the tissue types.

According to that article:
The hospital defended using smokers' lungs for transplants, saying that all organs were screened rigorously.

in which case it is then willfully providing sub standard stuff or they are grossly incompetent.

Surely it would not be hard to find a medical professional, especially in the area of respiratory specialty, who could identify that the organs were effected by nicotine, I mean its not hard to identify if you've ever seen such tissue.

tar

Given this bungle which seems to come from a Terry Gilliams Brazil-esqe script how do we interpret Malcom Turnbulls recent words...



"Are we for the socialist state, with its subordination of the individual to universal officialdom of government?" intoned Turnbull, speaking through Robert Menzies' oracular words. "Or are we for the ancient British faith that governments are the servants of the people?"

Malcomb Turnbull

neither side of it of it looks good to me ...

1 comment:

Noons said...

Turnbull is dead wrong and so was Menzies.
The problem is not the political system.
The problem is bureaucracy.
Jerry Pournelle (of Byte magazine's fame) calls it the "Pournelle Iron Law". Visit his blog, it's worth a look from time to time:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/