Causes and cures for the Accident and Emergency crisis: a data perspective

There have been a number of excellent pieces on Slugger recently regarding Northern Ireland’s A&E crisis. A lot of suggestions have been put forward for how to tackle the crisis, and a lot of reasons have been put forward for why performance, in particular against the four hour waiting time target, has deteriorated in recent years. I have been sourcing data to see how some of these ideas stack up. Too many bureaucrats and not enough doctors It has been …

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Emergency Emergency – the perilous state of Emergency care provision in Northern Ireland

Much has been made in the press in recent days about the crisis in local hospitals. Planned surgery has been cancelled to cope with the deluge in Accident and Emergency units. The system is certainly under strain and medical staff are under significant pressure. I thought it would be interesting to crunch the numbers to see how the difficulties being faced here compare to those in Britain. There is a nationwide target in Emergency units to treat, discharge, or admit …

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How the NI political landscape has changed since 2010

It could be argued that Westminster Elections are now very much of secondary importance and interest in Northern Ireland, compared to Stormont elections. However, this is shaping up to be a very peculiar election for the UK as a whole, and there is a very real possibility that the DUP could play a major power-broking role in the next parliament. Besides, first-past-the-post elections in a multi-party system are gloriously silly, given the prospect that you could “win” some seats with …

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What’s more effective at creating jobs and driving investment, corporate tax cuts or investing in education and skills?

One of the key arguments from advocates of the proposed Corporation Tax cut is that cutting taxes will stimulate job growth and attract foreign direct investment (FDI).  The paper on the DETI website quotes an OECD paper, which states that for every percentage point decrease in Corporation Tax, FDI increases by between 0% and 5%. However, the OECD paper was published in February 2008, and from an economic point of view, the world is a very different place to what …

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The Corporation Tax cut experiment – lessons learned from The Azores

The rocky outcrop of The Azores has been talked about more than is usual in Northern Ireland in recent months and years.  This isn’t due to its sudden explosion in popularity as a holiday destination for the good burghers of Ulster, but because of a 2006 ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Communities.  This decision concerned Portugal allowing its autonomous regions to reduce the rate of personal and corporate taxes by 30%, which the territory of The …

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