New sponsor for the PMICast podcast ... maybe !

Pleased to announce that from either episode 4 or 5 the PMICast will be sponsored by Audible - the worlds leading provider of audio books with 10,000's of titles available.

You'll be able to use a link to get one or two free books (depending on which level of membership you go for) then if you like the service you pay a small monthly fee to continue receiving monthly credits.

This is a sponsor that I'm particularly excited about as I have been a member of audible myself for around five years and I listen constantly on my iPhone - at the moment I have (according to the Audible App, invested 18 days, 4 hours amd 56 minutes to date listening to their content). I'm currently reading the first part of Game of Thrones on Audible and have just finished 'Excession' by the late Iain M Banks - once I get the relevant link sorted out to include in the 'cast I will introduce a segment and perhaps add in some Audible reviews and recommendations too.

Keep downloading the podcast and reading here for more information.

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Quikc update on the above - slight snag, need to have at least one US iTunes rating (and an average of 4*) to become part of this affiliate program - if you're a US listener of the podcast would you mind doing this for us - thanks !!!

An incompetent public sector

Without going into any details my family is having serious contact with social services and the NHS/care system as we struggle to look after an ageing relative.

Our experience is that the social services and local mental health teams are largely unhelpful and disinterested. Constantly putting barriers in the way of making decisions and essentially making life as difficult as possible - not surprising of course when trying to care for people who paid full tax and NI for their lives and are struggling for dignity during old age.

The impression one gets is that a patient or person requiring care is actually a burden rather than client to be helped - I think they (the various publicly funded bodies involved) are hoping that the family will get sick of the constant fight to get anywhere and simply pay for everything ourselves.

It is no wonder that scandals involving aged care in homes and hospitals and child abuse under the nose of social services goes on - no one will take ownership, no one talks to each other and the so called 'Teams' involved (no named contacts of course to speak to regularly) are either lazy - collecting their public salary for doing as little as possible or else they're totally incompetent.

Rant Over - For Now !

Place holder blog post today

So insanely busy today that I haven't had time to put together a cogent or informative blog post for my readers today - if you're interested in something relevant you should probably skip this one to be honest.

So far today :

• 2 dogs walked
• 1 40 minute telephone meeting
• 1 forgotten (nearly) cat vaccination - that was a bit of a blind panic and the cat was none too pleased
• over 70 e-mails assessed or replied to
• three new business applications processed
• 1 new client report sent and acknowledged
• 2 new clients called and information found for quote reports - 2 reports to diary for later in the week
• 27 to do items on phone reduced to 5 pending
• 1 sandwich purchsed
• 2 children (nicely) palmed off on relatives
• 1 visit from 'technician' to review a problem with new suite in the living room
• 1 dog quieted when he took against the above technician
• two thirds of MacBreak Weekly listened to while working (not as funny as usual)

Still to come :

• early meal prior to karate
• Karate Class at 6.00pm (still 2 Gi's to iron... gulp)
• another couple of hours of prep for tomorrow work
• seven or eight Premier Choice new business/renewal spreadsheets to complete (might do that tomorrow)
• 4 call backs

Really have no more time to waste on this post !

The business of pricing tourist attractions

As you'll see from yesterday I visited Skipton Castle and had a fun day out with the family.

Although the castle is nice and the visit good I was a little puzzled as to why the castle was so quiet (maybe 2 or 3 dozen people came though in the two and a half hours we were there) when the rest of Skipton was literally heaving to the point where we actually queued on the pavement several times to travel up and down the high street.

Unless there was some kind of unspoken boycott we were unaware of I suspect their problem was the pricing of admission to the castle itself. We paid £ 22.50 plus £ 2.90 (for a booklet) for a family ticket and as per the above comments took a leisurely stroll around the castle (as it was out first time) for a couple of hours and grabbed a quick cuppa in the on-site cafe - which cost another £ 14.

Although we enjoyed the visit I certainly wouldn't go back if I was required to pay another £ 22 as there simply isn't enough to do inside the castle and I suspect that many people that visit Skipton frequently go once and never come back - hence the low numbers.

There is a Friends of Skipton Castle repeat visitor ticket that I found on their website (no mention of it in the ticket office on site that I could see). However, this costs £ 18 per adult (up to three kids can visit free on this ticket) - however we'd still need two for Mr and Mrs Localventure. So total cost is still £ 36 which you'd only buy having visited once, paying full price to see if you liked it. This means for my family a total cost of £ 58 for more than one visit - and the requirement to visit 3 times in the first year to recoup the costs of visiting without the 'Friends' ticket.

Clearly people in Skipton have done the maths and decided that for the sake of visiting two or three times per annum it's clearly not worth it and I would tend to agree. If I was their business manager I would offer a much lower priced annual ticket and give a family version of it too - maybe a tenner for a single and then £ 15 for couple + kids  - after all, there is no actual 'cost' to the castle for having visitors in through the front door (sorry Portculis!) and more people surely means more revenue from the on-site cafe and shop.

There is a massive opportunity being squandered at a lovely local attraction - I'd also improve the range of cakes in their cafe too but that's another story.

Lovely day in Skipton

Visited Skipton in North Yorkshire for the Bank holiday and centred the visit around the Castle - one of the best preserved medieval castles in England - especially interesting in that the Lords Clifford were Lancastrian supporters in the War of the Roses and we've recently been watching the Phillipa Gregory series on the BBC - The White Queen (especially enjoyed by my 13 year old daughter who bizarrely liked King Richard best ?).

Great little castle (although I think they have a business problem that I will outline tomorrow on my blog).

Sunny day, quite quiet in the castle (maybe 2 dozen people in total) although Skipton itself was heaving with shoppers.

Heres are couple of snaps :

Main Entrance - leads to central hall

Ramparts - South side

Both pics taken with my handy Iphone 5 - with no editing.

It's one of the very few fully roofed bulidings of its nature and this makes the castle rooms although bare, still in good condition - it's not an enormous building but the dungeons, great hall and particularly the central courtyard with its full grown tree was quite impressive - reminded me of how I imagined the castle at Cair Paravel in Narnia would have looked (fictional I know).

Definitely worth a trip I would say although at £ 22 for a family of four, given the time it takes possibly overpriced.

Back to business blogging tomorrow.

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New post in Talk Health Partnership website

I have just uploaded a new post over at www.talkhealthpartnership.com/blog/2013/08/death-now-that-got-your-attention-a-slightly-funny-blog-post/ this is one of my longer form pieces on health related subjects.

Health Warning - This piece discusses both serious and also lighter sides of death and causes of death so it is one of those posts that has a the capability of offending and or upsetting - please remember when reading that the article is designed to inform, comment and also be irreverent.

Writers block

Spent most of today on and off attempting to come up with a concept for a blog post today and I have failed miserably. Must be the oppressive humidity !

Instead here's a republication of an article I wrote a couple of months ago on my Talk Health blog (you should be able to see the link to the right of this post to visit Talk Health and read my other articles) the piece discussed issues around why people elect to use private medicine as opposed to the NHS and why in fact the two sectors compliment rather than work against one another :

Do people buy ‘go private’ because the NHS is bad ?

In the United Kingdom the historic premise behind the National Health Service (NHS) has always been medical care free to the user at the point of delivery. It should of course never be forgotten that the NHS is anything but ‘free’ being funded in its entirety as a public sector organization paid for by central government.

However, since the formation the NHS in 1948 it has become increasingly apparent that all care cannot be ‘free’ and indeed in the 21st century we live in an era of both austerity in the economy generally but in particular one of a ‘post code lottery’ for NHS treatment, one only has to consider biological and hormonal therapies for cancer or infertility treatment (a topic I discussed obliquely in a previous post) to see that where you live can materially affect what treatment you receive and for how long. The issue of the cost and funding of the NHS is further exacerbated by the rising age of the population and advances in medical science that enable people to live longer but of course : older means by definition in most instances ‘sicker’ and older people are and will continue to be a big call on NHS funds.

The capability of the NHS to both cope with and provide for an adequate ongoing service to its user base – the UK population, us. It is an enormous debate that is played out both politically and in the media on a regular basis, again a topic covered in other posts. From some of these previous blog posts on Talk Health you’ll know that I have worked in both the National Health Service and the private medical sector in the last 25 years and it is not for me (or indeed a suitable discussion for this forum) to sell my readers private medical insurance. Indeed, medical insurance is not necessarily the ‘answer’ to the problems that may be perceived to exist within the NHS. In fact it would be true to say that in my experience it (medical insurance) is a complimentary rather than a competing effect.

My view is that that purchasers of medical insurance may be exhibiting a reaction to the above issues within the NHS and the very existence of a medical insurance is a symptom of the state of the healthcare market in the UK rather than the cause or the need for a competing private service.

Those people that take the decision to buy insurance of this kind are doing so for a number of reasons :

Some want peace of mind that they have extra cover in place. That might be due to personal experience (often a negative one) of the NHS. For some medical insurance is a lifestyle choice – to plan for elective, acute treatment, buying choice and freedom away from the limitations inherent in the NHS and of course, although waiting lists are less of a problem now than historically but there is still an issue in some specialties and geographic areas. Medical insurance is often at its best when solving this kind of postcode and waiting list lottery. Of course many people receive medical insurance cover as an employee benefit as a ‘perk’ of their jobs so for them medical insurance is not a choice particularly influenced by the NHS just an acknowledgement by their employer that an alternative to the NHS is useful for their business or demanded by employees.

In the context of the discussion above I wanted to end this article with a simple question. Is it worthwhile financially to buy medical insurance, regardless of the motivating factor for the purchase ? In the end I think it really depends on personal experience but it isn’t right for everyone and one has to bear in mind all the factors above and of course that for all its shortcomings, each and everyone of us that is a UK tax payer is already paying for NHS treatment anyway.

One needs to bear in mind that medical insurance does not replace the NHS – chronic (uncurable) and pre-existing conditions are not covered, nor is primary care (GP and other community based medical services) nor is accident and emergency treatment typically. Whilst medical insurance cover does not replicate the NHS it does provide input into the NHS system. Many insurers offer access to their policy holders to NHS pay facilities and although it is difficult to estimate the direct financial benefits (probably hundreds of thousands of pounds or more) it is certain that indirectly the private sector saves the NHS tens of millions of pounds in providing elective treatment for policyholders and self paying private clients who otherwise would be forced to use the NHS. It is also worth considering that to fulfil waiting list targets the NHS regularly takes spare capacity in the private sector (especially for common procedures like hip or knee replacements or cataract replacement where lower set procedure costs can be negotiated in advance in return for bulk contracting).

Regardless of ones political persuasion or view on the fairness of private medical insurance it is true to say that the private and public sectors are inextricably linked. The decision therefore to elect to purchase medical insurance isn’t then as simple as opting out of the NHS, rather it is case of weighing the factors discussed above whilst bearing in mind that one still funds the costs for the UK national health system via your tax and taking the decision to pay twice can be worthwhile if your personal requirements are to be fulfilled.

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If you are interested in looking at my business blog or my websites please feel free to visit :

My blog at www.localventure.blogspot.com and business websites :

www.premierchoicehealthcareltd.co.uk/consultants/phil-knight/ and

www.medicolegalmarketing.co.uk

Web Design - the value of learning as you go

It would be somewhat churlish to describe myself as a web designer, however over the years I have put together a variety of websites both with other people and myself and they have generally been pretty well laid out and done the job. I enjoy this work and would like to do more both recreationally and for money (!).

In this vein I have been doing some web design for a medico legal client over the last couple of weeks and although I use a template system to create the basic layout and design the client needed some bespoke html elements building into the site.

I am, as they say completely 'self taught' and this has been an enormous challenge for me but quite rewarding - things are going well and this morning I managed to overcome a problem with inserting a coloured text button and then a link into the button itself to another part of the site I am designing- only took me 20 minutes to figure out how to input the text and then target it towards the right bit of the site - very satisfying although granted this is really simple html programming.

Essentially with a bit of patience and access to You Tube tutorials I suspect you can pretty much do anything.

New sponsor for this blog and the PMICast podcast

Above this post at the top of the Localventure site (just under the title) you will find a banner advertising the Sonos wireless hifi system.

This is not random ad placed by google but rather our new affiliate sponsor - the blog and podcast receive a small commission on each sale made via our link and this is a good way for us to cover the costs of the free content.

If you are interested in creating a really cool and effective wireless music playing network at home fro ma state of the art, cutting edge tech company then Sonos is the answer.

Their system works from your smart phone and enables you to seamlessly play music, radio and even audio books around your home with total control - their base systems start from $ 349 and the quality and control is excellent.

Please click on the link to see more, make sure you do some research on the system that suits you and then if you do decide to make a purchase make sure you do so via our link - it would be of immense help.

Thanks !

Petrol Vouchers

Whilst I was away on holiday I spent £60 at Sainsburys and received a voucher for 6p discount off each litre of fuel at their petrol station. I claimed this saving easily with no problems at my next visit to buy fuel. 

Today I received the same voucher deal from Morrisons so took the voucher to the forecourt this evening. Unfortunately they required the actual shopping receipt to offer the discount. Obviously I don't carry all my shopping receipts with me and therefore couldn't use the discount voucher.

The attendant was also a bit of a prick about it I'm sorry to say.

Now that's customer service - it also begs the question, why not just use the receipt as a voucher instead of procuring an, effectively useless, second bit of voucher paper.

I'd say I will never use Morrisons Petrol station again but the two local petrol stations are both of the Morrisons variety and they effectively have a local monopoly.