Journalist, editor, analyst and trainer on computing, government, climate and data
Volunteer-run libraries are taking on health promotion work as well as supporting vulnerable people in the local community
Barton-under-Needwood library in Staffordshire is overseen by an NHS trust: it allows volunteers to run it but also means it offers advice on mental health and healthy living. Continue reading “NHS partners up with libraries to boost wellbeing”
The NHS was never going to get an extra £350m a week from Britain leaving the European Union. Boris Johnson, who spent the last few weeks on a bus pushing this claim, is a political corpse. But missing out on this money will not be the health service’s biggest Brexit challenge.
It looks likely that a post-Brexit Britain will control immigration more tightly than it has as part of the EU. As NHS England head Simon Stevens said during the referendum campaign, the health and care sectors depend heavily on 135,000 EU staff, about 5% of the total workforce. Continue reading “After Brexit, the NHS will have to home-grow its people”
New app What3Words, also used by emergency teams in a cholera outbreak in Tanzania, can help medical services locate ill festivalgoers amid a sea of tents
What3Words, which provides addressing services that work in the most desolate corners of the earth where people live in the most basic conditions, also covers the Glastonbury Festival.
Continue reading “Injured at Glastonbury? Three little words will help medics find you”
I have written the cover article for the new issue of the NUJ’s Journalist magazine on organisations offering Google alternatives, covering the likes of DuckDuckGo, Firefox, Runbox, WordPress, OpenStreetMap, Mapbox and Ordnance Survey, as well as what I reckon Google does well. You can read it magazine’s digital version, on pages 18 and 19.
This was inspired by a meeting for journalists at Google’s non-permanent for tax purposes establishment at Central St Giles, detailed here on the NUJ’s London Freelance website.
Links for the Journalist piece are below.
Continue reading “Google alternatives for NUJ Journalist magazine”
The Register has just published my piece on why IT departments in Britain employ so many staff from outside Britain (and likewise in the US).
There’s a lively debate already underway in the comments, but rather than immigration, interviewees blame a combination of schools’ lack of interest in coding – now being changed by schemes like Raspberry Pi’s Code Club – and a sense that software engineering isn’t a top-draw job, unlike respectable professions such as, er, investment banking. Continue reading “IT, immigration and education for The Register”