Journalist, editor, analyst and trainer on computing, government, climate and data
There are plenty of reasons to visit Britain’s cathedrals, including faith, history and spectacular architecture. Formerly, food may not have been one of them. However, along with other improvements in British cuisine, my research suggests that it is now possible to find good cathedral food – if not in the same building, then in a suitably Christian location not far away. Continue reading “The good cathedral food guide to Hereford, Brecon, Chester and London”
Everyone in England needs healthcare, so you might imagine that NHS jobs would be fairly evenly distributed based on population.* That isn’t quite the case, as this interactive map, using data from the NHS Information Centre on the largest English NHS employers and each region, shows. Continue reading “Where are the NHS jobs: the biggest NHS employers mapped”
Perhaps the most evocative road signs are those that mention not a city or town, but a region – particularly when that region is The North, which appears (as The NORTH) on signs as far south as Upper Street in Islington. But there is a problem: where is The North, or at least, where is its southern boundary? Continue reading “Where is The North? Where is The South? The NHS can help”
Last week saw the publication of the latest Scottish Health Survey. There is plenty of interest – scroll down to figure 2, showing how cigarette smoking is correlated to deprivation, with about 12% of the least deprived fifth of men smoking compared with more than 40% of the most deprived fifth. But what it doesn’t do is compare Scotland’s health to that of other parts of the UK. Continue reading “The mystery of why Scotland’s health is worse than England’s”
A new NHS hospital typically costs hundreds of millions of pounds to build. Trusts do what anyone buying a new home does: they take out a mortgage. The problem has been that most trusts (in England, anyway) have had only one, weird type of mortgage available: a private finance initiative (PFI). Continue reading “Hartlepool shows how pension funds could save NHS hospitals from PFI”