Doug Paulley's blog

disability, data protection, activism and other such

Wetherby and Kielder Weather

Posted on by Doug Paulley

OK not political, FoI or Disability related for once.

I’ve been busy recently writing two Weather websites. The first, Wetherby Weather, started from a bargain basement purchase of a weather station on eBay. Using Cumulus and various utilities written by generous and talented third parties, that data is put on the Web – realtime and archived – as well as being supplied to various weather networks round the world. I log wind direction and strength (average and gust), also temperature, barometric pressure and humidity.

What do most people look at weather websites for, though? The forecast. The best I could achieve with that was the Zambretti automatic short-term weather forecast. That’s reasonable for a few hours, if a little less than descriptive – but not much more than that. I linked to the Met Office forecast – but ideally wanted to produce my own.

WXSIM fits the bill perfectly. It’s just been adjusted to work with Cumulus. It is customised for Wetherby. It takes aviation weather data, meteorological station, weather buoys, ozone measurements, data from regular weather balloon soundings and the outputs of the global forecast system. Starting with the current and historical data from my weather station, and using carefully tailored internal algorithms, it models various elements of the weather over the next few days.

It models temperature, dew point, precipitation, barometric pressure, wind direction, strength and gusts at various levels, advection, soil moisture, Ultraviolet radiation, visibility, wind chill, humidex, evapotranspiration, cloud cover at five atmospheric levels, and other things beyond my ken, to produce a detailed and accurate weather forecast.

I perform some manual forecasts; then my system runs the model and updates the forecast 8 times a day automatically based on the decisions I made in my last manual run.

The detailed forecast is then uploaded and is available on the Wetherby Weather website. It’s also available on the iPhone / Android Wetherby Weather site, as a daily email from the free Wetherby Weather mailing list, via the Wetherby Weather Twitter feed and the Wetherby Weather Facebook profile. I also upload photos, and commentary on any unusual weather events happening in Wetherby.

Then I went away. There’s a fabulous place I go regularly; a disability respite and outdoor activity centre on Kielder water. It sounds trite but the Calvert Trust Kielder has changed my life. It’s made me aware of what can happen with a staff and organisational “can do” attitude and atmosphere; as opposed to some less helpful attitudes from other organisations I could mention. It’s been a challenge and a comfort over the past 10 years; a genuine respite – particularly during the shameful abuse and eviction attempt by Leonard Cheshire..

I ruminated that finding an accurate forecast for Kielder is difficult. A decent, customised forecast for Kielder would be invaluable. With my recent experience with Wetherby, I knew that I could set up a forecast for Kielder. So I did. See the Kielder Weather website and Kielder Weather mobile site, also the Kielder Weather Twitter feed and Kielder Weather Facebook profile.

The Calvert Trust Kielder feature my forecast on their homepage, and published a news article about my forecasts.

So what now? I archive both sets of forecasts and will be tweaking them against actual data observed – though this is proving somewhat difficult to obtain for Kielder. I am hoping to increase the accuracy of my forecasts.

I’m in the middle of an Open University course on meteorology (having got an existing degree in Earth Sciences and IT through them). No doubt that will inspire me further in new directions!

Ex-carer (lesbian) to be returned to homophobic Malawi

Posted on by Doug Paulley

My ex-carer is being deported to Malawi. She’s claiming asylum as she is a lesbian; society in Malawi is strongly anti-gay, so much so that last year the government introduced a new law specifically against lesbianism. She faces returning to a forced marriage to an abusive husband, and lifelong denial of her sexuality on threat of State or community punishment. The Home Office are refusing to believe her. Please do sign this petition.

CQC lie about their competence

Posted on by Doug Paulley

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has come in for somewhat of a bashing recently. But I didn’t think they would lie as well.

In response to a recent documentary exposing care home abuse, CQC said the following in their media statement:

CQC carries out an unannounced inspection of every care and nursing home in England every year – more often if we believe people may be at risk. This system of regulation can and does identify poor care which CQC then takes action to tackle.

What?!

A quick look at the five care homes I’d stayed in in the last year revealed last inspection dates as follows:

  • Summer 2010 (in response to a specific incident, last “proper” inspection November 2007)
  • January 2009
  • November 2009
  • February 2011 (in response to specific allegations)
  • December 2009

Not one was inspected in the past 12 months. 0%.

Personal experience with looking for care homes for a relative confirmed the impression that most care homes have gone well beyond 12 months without an inspection.

I smelled a rat. So I asked CQC how many homes it had indeed inspected. The response came. Answering a slightly different question, CQC admit they did 13,082 inspections of care homes over the last 12 months. There are 17,756 care homes. So at least 26% of homes didn’t get inspected. I say “at least” as where CQC identifes problems at a care home they conduct more than one inspection. (hence why I think their FoI response is disingenuous.)

Let’s look at these once again.

  • “CQC carries out an unannounced inspection of every care and nursing home in England every year – more often if we believe people may be at risk.”
  • Of the 17,756 English care homes, CQC did 13,082 inspections over the last 12 months.

Is it me, or do the figures not add up?

Where did this come from?

The sad thing is we always knew CQC would be an appalling, incompetent mashup.

It was formed from a merger of the Healthcare Commission, the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) and the Mental Health Act Commission a couple of years ago. Having worked with CSCI, who were at least trying to do things right, me and other service users raised the concern that it would follow the sad precedent of the subjugation of disabled people’s rights following the Disability Rights Commission being subsumed into the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Sadly, we were right. Our concerns that social care would always be lower priority than healthcare were realised.

It didn’t help that the new body was given new, overarching registration standards. These same standards applied to all bodies registered – from acute hospitals, to dentists and care homes. The result being the emphasis on residents rights was lost, and the regulations simply weren’t specific enough for the situation. We lost rights in the change.

Then CQC sacked 70% of its inspectors so that it could register dentists. They adopted what they acknowledge as light touch regulation. They ceased grading care homes, and largely stopped inspecting them. The majority of care home reviews became based on self-declaration by care home managers. Inspections became very rare. Now, precisely which poorly performing care homes would state this to the regulator do you think?

Abuse

All this came to a head during the very sad and distressing Panorama documentary of the systemic abuse of people with learning difficulties at Winterbourne View. CQC became a very public whipping boy, held accountable for a lot of what happened. Much criticism resulted, including a select committee and the PM criticisng CQC for reducing inspections. Many made a comparison with the seminal Silent Minority documentary exposing the “care” of people with learning difficulties in institutions in the early 1980s. (Documentary available to view online – very distressing too.)

Meanwhile, there’s been blood on the carpet and accusations of gagging orders on staff etc. CQC has become a toxic brand. It’s been desperately attempting to reinvent itself, so far (in my view) failing miserably.

Consequences

If it wasn’t so serious, this would be funny. The reality is, though, that people are suffering as a result of this disgusting shambles. Care home residents are some of the most vulnerable, most disadvantaged, most disempowered people in this country. Abuse is the norm, not the exception in my experience; it just varies in degree. Without an effective regulator, the thousands of people in care homes up and down the country suffer even more abuse, poor treatment, curtailment of life opportunities.

CQC are ineffective, stuffed up, an ineffective regulator who lie about themselves to try and stop the torrent of legitimate criticism aimed their way. They are beyond redemption and need replacing.

(With grateful thanks as always to the wonderful Crippen for his inciteful cartoon 🙂