24 March 2022: Foster - B

And so to the unbroadcast episode of "How Clean is Your House?" The PFC laboratory Inspectors, Aggie MacKenzie and Kim Woodburn, were apparently fixated on screw-top bottles (more alcohol references for the schoolboy minds). It is as if there were no other significant issues raised by Aggie and Kim.

The SHHD didn't want the PFC speaking with inspectors, so that it would not interfere with the convenient protection of Crown Immunity. Dr Watt wanted to have input from the Inspectors, apparently to give greater protection in case of an adverse event. But he was accused of manipulating the involvement of the Inspectors as a way to force the SHHD to cough up more money. What a way to run a crucial health facility? Politics and posturing placed ahead of health and safety. The elephant in the laboratory, was that if the inspection had been to a commercial lab, it would fail the standards and would be shut down until they cleaned their act up. Well surprise, surprise. That makes me feel greater confidence in them all - not!

On pool sizes, it was a case of "the bigger the better" in order to meet demand. Makes me wonder if the goal of meeting targets was prioritised over the goal of safely treating patients. As Tommy would say, it's an argument of "substance over form".

Dr Foster is presented with one of the tables of pool sizes presented yesterday in evidence. The first thing the good doctor does is to question the accuracy of the data. (Immediately, more sarcastic reassurance is being felt.) The assertion was remade that having ever bigger pools was the ONLY way to produce enough material to meet demand (... and remembering that those demand estimates were criticised during the previous two days of evidence). But was it really the only way? It seems more like a case of thinking inside the box. After all, how do more populous countries produce material to meet demand from their vastly larger citizenry? It is surely a case of the right amount of investment. Isn't that a main reason why we fill in a national census every 10 years, so the Government can plan ahead to deliver services that meet anticipated need?

What fun, the England/Scotland relationship is described in one piece of cited evidence as a Punch and Judy show. All public fights and fallout. If that wasn't amusing enough, the suggestion is made that despite the comedic characterisation, the reality was of two sets of people who were regularly "getting into bed together" (... waits for more schoolboy humour to subside). Dr Foster didn't help by his continuation of the imagery as he mentioned some specific examples of mutually beneficial friends coming together to closely collaborate on common interests.

We go back to visualising the graphic process of fractionation as Dr Foster speaks of "tanks" of "melted plasma" becoming a suspended solution and heated to a specific temperature, and from which the important bits are extracted. (Hammer House of Horror probably made the corporate documentary ... "Frying Tonight").

Clarification came on the claim of Scotland being the world's first nation to achieve self-sufficiency. It was self-sufficiency specifically of blood products, and it was from specifically voluntary donations. How else could the US have been so active prior to this time in shipping blood stuffs all around the world?

Finally for this session, we hear that BPL was much closer than thought to being privatised, and had it not been for media intervention, it might well have been. If only that same media had been as interested in exposing the NHS Contaminated Blood Scandal, we might all be long past this process, happily sitting in the conservatory of our country cottage reading gardening books. Ho-hum.

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