Healthcare at the Edinburgh Festival

Last year, the Wellcome Foundation inaugurated a programme at the Edinburgh Festival called The Sick of the Fringe (#TSOTF16) to explore some of the boundaries and synergies between the worlds of medicine and the arts.  Healthcare is a major issue in Scotland; barely a day goes by without an article in the national press about the impending obesity, stroke or heart attack crisis and the effect it will have on healthcare provision.  In the second year of TSOTF it was interesting to see whether it had started to have an effect.  There certainly seemed to be some progress in the way new writing tackled healthcare issues.

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Smart Meter Update

“Hello, this is the British Electricity Smart Meter hotline.  You are number two million, four hundred and sixty eight thousand, two hundred and twenty three in a queue.  We’re sorry your smart meter has disconnected you and that you have no electricity.  We are working to upgrade the firmware in all of our smart meters and hope to have your power restored sometime in the next six months.  Thank you for your call.”

It’s the scenario that no-one in the energy industry wants to talk about – the day that Britain’s smart meters go wrong or get hacked and millions of users lose power.  It will probably never happen, but some things have such appalling consequences that we shouldn’t design and deploy something that makes even that small probability possible.  But we have.  And nobody appears to have thought about making sure it’s possible to recover from it.

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