Hewitt was warned over insecure data
The Department of Health was told at least a month ago that the website used
by junior doctors to apply for training posts was not secure (Nigel Hawkes
writes).
A letter written to Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, by Craig White,
president of the British Orthopaedic Trainees Association, complained of
“serious flaws” in the computer system, with “shortlisters reporting they
could access . . . applications they had nothing to do with”.
The letter was released by Stephen O’Brien, a Tory health spokesman. He said:
“Allowing junior doctors’ personal information to become available in this
way is completely unacceptable.”
Murder charge
A man has been charged with the murder of an East London mother who
disappeared last week. Westley Ibe, 27, is to appear today before Stratford
magistrates, charged with the murder of Janet Hossain, 32, who had four
children. Her car was found on Wednesday and there was a body in the boot.
Police have not yet confirmed its identity.
Funding stopped
The Home Office has stopped funding the National Black Police Association
until the organisation accounts properly for how it spent £600,000 of
government money. It is unclear whether the association has ever submitted
properly audited accounts of its activities, according to a report in this
week’s edition of Police Review.
Kidnap charges
Marvin Canning, 45, a brother-in-law of Martin McGuinness, who will become
Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister next month, denied seven charges
connected with the cross-border kidnapping of a man and a woman this week.
The man was shot in the legs. The case was adjourned to May 24 by
Londonderry magistrates.
Doctors’ alert over dance-drug danger
Doctors have highlighted the dangers of a new dance-scene drug that many users
falsely believe to be without risks (Nigel Hawkes writes).
The drug, benzylpiperazine, or BZP, was taken by an 18-year-old woman who
collapsed in a London nightclub and suffered a seizure. She was given
emergency treatment in hospital, recovered, and was discharged after 12
hours.
Doctors writing in The Lancet warn colleagues to watch out for other
young people suffering adverse reactions to the drug, which was legally
available over the counter until last month.
The active ingredient in BZP is piperazine, which was developed in the 1950s
as a veterinary medicine for treating intestinal worms. Recently it has
become an increasingly popular alternative to Ecstasy and amphetamines.
Marriage in decline
Married people will soon be in a minority, figures from the Office for
National Statistics show. The proportion fell by 0.7 per cent in 2005 to
50.3 per cent, and single, divorced and widowed people will outnumber them.
The organisation also said that it would amend the census to avoid omitting
young people.
Tuberculosis alert
Nearly 600 former hospital patients are being told that a staff member has
tuberculosis. She became ill in September and stopped work last month.
Eighty people who were patients on surgical ward 16 at York Hospital for at
least two weeks will be advised to have an X-ray; others are told to see
their GP if they are concerned.
Slave names online
British slavery records have been made available online for the first time.
The collection, on ancestry.co.uk, dates back to the abolition of slavery
and includes three million slaves in the Caribbean, South Africa and Ceylon.
About 186,000 pages of names are included, dating from between 1815 and
1834.
Beach clean-up
Beaches and seawater near the site of a massive sewage spill have been given
the all-clear. Samples from the Firth of Forth were tested after about 100
million litres of sewage poured into the sea from the Seafield Wastewater
works in Edinburgh. There are still warnings against eating affected fish or
shellfish.
Christmas cheque
A British tourist whose spine was broken when a Christmas tree fell on him in
Prague has been awarded 559,000 koruna (£13,500). A Czech appeals court
ordered that Malcolm Tuffin should receive compensation from the city and
the agency that organised the Christmas market where the tree fell in 2003.
‘Unprecedented’ job cuts in NHS
The NHS suffered the biggest cut in its workforce last year since records
began, figures show (David Rose writes).
The number of people working in the health service fell by about 17,000
between September 2005 and September 2006, during a drive to cut costs.
The reduction in the workforce, the first since Labour came to power in 1997,
equates to 8,118 full-time equivalent staff, when all the people working
part-time are taken into account.
The figures are contested by opposition parties and health unions, who claim
that frontline services have borne the brunt of thousands more job cuts in
the NHS.
The Department of Health insists that the actual number of redundancies is
small, and says that it is mainly managers, rather than doctors and nurses,
whose numbers have been reduced.
Large classes
More than half a million primary school children aged 7 to 11, or one in four,
are being taught in classes numbering more than 30. Government figures also
show that in January 18,480 children were being taught in “lawfully large”
classes of 31 or over, compared with 16,080 a year earlier.
Disabled PC appeal
The Metropolitan Police is facing an appeal from a wheelchair-bound man who
was rejected for a post as a fully operational officer. A serving
Metropolitan Police officer, who did not want to be named, said: “It should
be blatantly obvious to everyone that you can’t go out on the beat in a
wheelchair.”
TV soap wars
The BBC is preparing to drop Neighbours, the popular soap it has
screened since 1986. A bidding war has forced up the price of the Australian
series from £25,000 to £80,000 an episode. ITV and Five have entered a
bidding war for Neighbours, which is the second-most-popular
programme on daytime TV.
Viagra found in jail
Viagra, cocaine, heroin and cannabis have been found among contraband at an
open jail, according to the Home Office. Sixty-one drug finds were made at
Ford open prison in Sussex last year along with 112 mobile phones and eight
weapons, mostly homemade implements or knives.
Alarms for pupils
Truants are being given alarm clocks to get them to school on time. Portsmouth
City Council has bought 80 of the £5 alarms to give out to schools. But
Trisha Raper, head of Miltoncross School in the city, said: “Pupils are not
absent because they can’t get up and this seems like a colossal waste of
money.”
No doubt we will be hearing more apologies from the fools in the Department of Health regarding the disgraceful leaks of confidential information from the websites. On top of the MMC/MTAS fiasco regarding the treatment of doctors training to be the next generation of consultants and upon whom the whole system relies, it is high time that heads rolled within the Department of Health. Not just Ms Hewitt should resign – incompetence on this scale needs a root and branch clear out!
David L. Cox, Loggerheads, UK