Tags
(not satire – it’s the UK today!)
Meet Roger Goss from an organisation called Patient Concern:
Goss has been popping up all over the news today telling us that allowing women to have better access to the morning-after-pill will promote promiscuity.
Unfortunately for us, Goss is not only co-founder of Patient Concern. He also serves on various Department of Health, NHS and medical Royal College committees and working groups as a ‘respected’ representative of patients’ rights.
That would be our rights.
But Goss doesn’t just seem to have a problem with women patients when it comes to trusting ‘them’ with contraception. He also thinks women don’t make good GPs (in his own words):
“……..about half of GPs are women, they only want to work Monday and Wednesday afternoons.”
More about that in this excellent blog post on Goss by Margaret McCartney:
It seems Mr Goss doesn’t just have a problem with women patients – or with women doctors – but with women in general.
Erm …. can we have a new patients’ representative please?
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Incidentally, Goss’s organisation Patient Concern also wins the prize for absolutely worst website design in the whole history of the internet. Take a look. I’m right.
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Please feel free to comment.
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Pride's Purge 
That site is awful it certainly would win the wooden spoon, I’m assuming his so called body is just him. I find it amazing that these people manage to pretend they are important and fool those who should know better. We have someone called Ian Syme who paid for an internet site called north staffs healthwatch, he is nothing to do with the real health watch, but there is a local paper who describes him as an expert, although he has no healthcare qualifications and as far as we can ascertain has never worked in a hospital in any role.
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Now there is a website that needs to be redone by a 5 year old right there
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All these kind of organisations need watching and investigating to see who is running them, what they are really doing – and why they get official favour.
Luckily, the website technology that “Patient Concern” has difficulty with means that much can be found out about them by citizens and then shared.
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this concerned patient is certainly angry, that such a person might be representing me….
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That concerns me, too. This also reminds me of the “Taxpayers’ Alliance”. I pay Tax. They don’t represent me.
And oh, what a wayback website!
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and i’ll
“And oh, what a wayback website!” what like? from hell to paradise lost?
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Just like Mary Whitehouse & the “Viewers and Listeners’ Association”, just one lonely old sod with an axe to grind and the tenacity of a leech in getting themselves promoted. Let’s have a bit of a concerted effort to respond to his loner old git misogynistic ramblings, wherever they are used to fill in for the absence of noise in opposition to something widely accepted. The press just want controversy, whereas reporting a story as a move that meets the majority consensus seems to be beyond them Y’know, a good news story?
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Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
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Reblogged this on Vox Political.
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Would it be somehow better if he was a lonely young sod, or a young git? You sound very anti the elderly. I know an 84 year old woman who chained herself to Westminster Bridge to try to save the NHS for everyone – old, young, and in between. Pensioners are forming networks with younger peoples organisations, activists, academics and experts to fight to save what we can for future generations. We are marching (or rather hobbling )in big numbers, we are writing briefing papers, Newsletters, letters to MPs and others, lobbying in parliament and signing petitions. When I see this sort of ageism I despair!! He is not in any way representative of older people. We have to stop using disparaging language to describe different generations, and realise we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with good, caring people, whatever their age.
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Splendid article by Chloe Hamilton about this in today’s i.
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jean
being over 60, myself i totally agree with you, we can still make a big noise, and should…
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At last! We finally have a competitor for Universal Jobmatch . . .
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While agreeing with Tom P on the content and anachronisms with Goss, Goss’s website loads very quickly (well under a second) and gives easy links to the bits they want to show.
Tom’s (this) website takes 10 seconds to finish loading and old articles are hard to find. It’s what happens when you use WordPress (like I do), though there are ways to speed it up.
BTW, that was a technical point. Tom’s design is modern (well it would be, it’s WordPress) and to the point (well it would be, it’s Tom!) and Roger Goss’s does look like a 96 website and does look like it’s a one-man shouting box for wholly duff ideas.
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Everyone over 60 that I know is fighting for the NHS, and for the future of the country in terms of jobs, conditions, the environment etc. We want this for our children and granchildren. We wouldn’t mind it for ourselves either, but apparently we are not valuable to society, despite being much loved family members, active in our communities, and generally being prepared to stand up for our descendants and fight those in power if need be. Maybe that is why we are to be culled, or at least the poorer and less healthy of us. I do not want to pit my “contribution to society” against a young person – he takes drugs and drink, and beats his wife, so the operation is mine!! Who decides, and where does it end?? If an operation or medication is helpful, it should be there according to need, not societies judgement of value, which can be manipulated. First the old, then the workless, and then…..?
I have attended meetings with Roger. He is somewhat eccentric, and says what “they” want to hear, mixed with his own prejudices. I am not sure he is really taken seriously, but he is handy if you want to say you have consulted, but don’t really want to listen to the bigger representative groups who might not agree. More worrying are the big charities who employ young graduates to speak for patients in meetings and consultations, but actually toe official lines, as there are contracts to be won.
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Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
Margaret McCartney’s post, to which this is link, effectively demolishes all of Goss’ complaints, based on her own personal experience as a doctor and a working mum. I always understood that doctors, including women, worked punishingly long hours. Indeed, I can remember a BBC drama about it, set in a hospital, which showed exhausted medical staff working long shifts, and grabbing what sleep they could when they could. Where Goss got his ideas from I really don’t know. Possibly the Daily Mail.
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Oh dear…
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Reblogged this on Jay's Journal and commented:
Scratches head..?
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I’d agree with all that. All Goss has to do is change the gifs for simple text and he’d win awards for it.
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it does seem to me as a specialist survivor of medical bloodsports targeting humans that we need a more serious and higher quality approach to patient’s rights than this–major medical abuses keep coming to light–massive problem–trying to make it look like a problem of women GPs incorrect–it is men and women. In my case a notorious former Caithness GP DR MORAY FRASER–a man–recognised as out to harm me–even named in LUKE FOWLER’S film about me on evidence–so this man GP led me on a trail leading to so much unpleasantness I am still at risk in my cancerous 60s. in the face of massive medical and “system’s” crimes with much evidence we need highest quality response–not rubbish. I am still at risk–and I am but a drop in an ocean. Help us.
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jean
fight…yes the planting of reps is even got a name called the “delphi technique” it is now in wide spread use….they aim to produce collective cognitive convergence…so “odd balls” are marginalized, and eventually excluded all devious stuff…
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Where do they find these fracking idiots?
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Whoa there!!! Let’s not get carried away with inflating one correctly used word into a litany of my apparent prejudices. You feel righteous and criticise me, hurl angry examples of things you think I don’t know about – just because I called someone old? It’s so silly, I do not see any point in rising to it, but really, how dare you?
I too am a pensioner, so I can also consider myself to be an old codger. Disabled, too, having just gone through the IB to ESA migration, so yeah, really quite up to speed on a lot of things. You accused me of being “anti elderly”, followed closely by the fact that you “despair” at (your imaginary anti-elderly attitude in) MY post.
Can I then despair of people who see what they want and then make judgemental remarks about someone about something that wasn’t there in the first place?
My description of “old” for him and Mary Whitehouse was based on observation, as wrinkles and grey hair is usually associated with older folk. Unfortunately, these people do play to the stereotype of grumpy old men & women. They are used by the press to propagate unrepresentative views, including allowing this “old git’s” highly offensive misogynistic crap to be repeated. YOU see apparent anti- elderly attitude from me, and miss the issue completely.
I could equally be offended and dramatically “despair” that some consider him “eccentric”, which sort of implies a bit harmless. With the resurgence of many right wing, regressive attitudes promoted by this government. these are dangerous times for all of us, and our existing rights. That is very dangerous, not eccentric.
So, Jean Smith, you seem to think I need a talking down to, and lecture about issues and activism, so hear this:-
I fought for women’s rights, was part of the generation who actively campaigned for equality at work, divorce rights, rights over our own bodies, and reproduction, and many other things that people now don’t even think about as contentious issues. I marched with the CND from 1959 through to the 1990’s. I worked endlessly for trade Union rights, was a branch organiser too in more than one union. I can barely walk as a result of a knee injury sustained on an anti-Thatcher demo. I got beaten up by police on the Grunswick picket line and worked for the Anti Apartheid campaign, miners strike, Poll Tax, Amnesty, Release, housing co-ops and squatter groups, the ANL, and many others. I was “the first” woman in several roles, opening the way for other women, and it was tough beyond belief. I could continue, but I hope you realise by now how pathetic your accusations are, never mind hectoring me about the NHS.
We have seen propaganda turn opinion against the disabled, ill, the unemployed, and the working poor. Ignoring this type of misogyny as eccentric could be the start of the slippery slope on women’s rights too, if left unchecked. May I inform you of the fact that the cuts are harming more women than men, across all areas?
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You ask if I would say similar about younger people? With that rhetorical question, with your own ill-formed reply, you then “prove” that apparently I favour the young, and am anti-elderly. Really, listen to your own words to find prejudice, not mine.
You and others must read more carefully. I said that these types were used to fill in the absence of noise by an opposition – if I must spell it out, that means that no-one is opposed to the extension of the morning after pill and only the “eccentric” was found to fill in that void, someone calling women using birth control promiscuous. Heavens sake, that is not saying that there is no opposition out there!
Age is not an issue (for me, anyway) – but a bloke given space in the press with these offensive views IS a problem.
Would you like to debate my meaning of the words “git” and “loner” now?
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That IS about the worst website ever!
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I think simple text might actually be an improvement in this case! 🙂
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Jean, I was going to take issue with your rant, but Florence has comprehensively done it for me, an excellent demolition job on your arguments (BTW, I’m in my late sixties, so I don’t think you can legitimately call me anti-elderly).
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