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/RSS FeedWe’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).
Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.
Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.
Enjoy!
Links
- Blog post on the Register of Financial Interests spreadsheet; and more details on what it contains
- Blog post about Reddit, WhatDoTheyKnow, and Physician Associates
- Blog post on the diminishing number of APPGs
- AccessInfo Impact Awards
- Full details on how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro by linking to your outcomes
- Our TikTok account
- Our Bluesky account
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
[0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in.
[0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager.
[0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side. (more…)
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Are you an individual or an organisation who’s used the Right to Information to have a positive impact on society — or perhaps you know one that has?
Either way, you can celebrate great use of FOI by nominating it for an Access Info Impact Award. The winner will be invited to present their work in front of an international audience at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Madrid, with travel expenses covered.
Find all the details on Access Info’s website here – but better get to it, as nominations close on 9 September.
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WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit: bring them together, and amazing things can happen — as we’ve discovered from one of our users.
We’ve been talking to Yasmin Marsh, who, as part of a small collective of NHS doctors and staff named PA Project Watch group, is investigating concerns around the use of under-qualified medical staff in NHS hospitals and GP surgeries. With a combination of facts received through Freedom of Information requests, and on the ground experience from members of the r/DoctorsUK subreddit, they’ve created a change in policy in at least one NHS Trust.
What is a PA?
We asked Yasmin to explain the basics of PA Project Watch’s campaign to us, and anyone else who might not know the finer details of how the NHS functions. So first of all, what does the PA in the group’s name refer to?
“It’s ‘Physician Associate‘, a role previously known as a ‘Physician Assistant’,” she explained.
“A PA is a member of the healthcare team who works under the supervision of a senior doctor to help care for patients. You can train to become a PA with a 24 month MSc or PgDip.
“The role was originally designed so that PAs would always work under the supervision of senior doctors and assist the medical team in caring for patients.”
The trouble with PAs
OK, so what’s the issue with PAs?
“Because no official rules have been set around what they can or can’t do”, says Yasmin, “they’ve been used inappropriately by NHS hospitals and GP surgeries to replace doctors.”
In these stretched times, it’s perhaps inevitable that shortages are being addressed by any means possible? Yasmin agrees:
“You can see the temptation for NHS managers and GP surgeries — if there are doctor shortages, fill the gaps with PAs instead. They’re also cheaper than doctors!”
Yasmin told us that the General Medical Council are planning to introduce regulation later this year, but meanwhile, there are potential dangers around this situation.
“I’ve seen first-hand the problems of using PAs,” she said. “It comes back to the old saying ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. As they’ve only done a 24 month course, they miss covering lots of important topics, and the topics they do cover are only covered in superficial depth, skimming over lots of important medical topics briefly. There’s a reason medical school is five to six years!
“So, for example, when looking at a patient’s blood tests, I’ve seen a PA miss a common critical abnormality because they simply lacked knowledge — they’d never been taught about that particular blood test abnormality or what it means. If you speak to doctors, these types of errors are happening through the use of PAs up and down the country.”
So how critical is it?
“There have been several deaths of patients due to mistakes made by PAs, which have been reported by the BBC1, the Manchester Evening News2, and in two stories from the Telegraph3.”
WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit
So that certainly explains the groups’ concerns, and their desire to do something about it — now, how did WhatDoTheyKnow and Freedom of Information come into the picture?
Yasmin hadn’t been fully familiar with the concept before: “I had heard of FOI requests, but I never knew they could be submitted by anybody. I thought you had to be a journalist or an investigator to submit them. However, I found WhatDoTheyKnow through Google when looking for another topic about my local council, and then discovered that anyone could send them.”
And what about the link with Reddit? Yasmin’s shared FOI responses as the group has received them, allowing for vital scrutiny of the information provided, from those working in the settings in question, who are able to compare the responses with their own experiences.
“Reddit has been central to this campaign. I’d really emphasise the role of the /r/DoctorsUK community. Without them, this would not have been possible.”
A strong example comes from the FOI request sent to Torbay Hospital.
“We received a message from a Reddit user who said this hospital was using PAs inappropriately to replace doctors, often in the paediatric department, but also covering other gaps in the hospital rota like the surgery and medicine departments.
“After this message, I sent an FOI request to the hospital, asking them how many times doctors had been replaced by PAs. They replied:
None, physician associates are not permitted to cover doctor’s shifts.
“We then posted this on the r/DoctorsUK community asking if this was true, and for any evidence that PAs were replacing doctors. We received testimony from paediatric nursing staff and a rota, showing that PAs regularly replaced doctors in the paediatric department. This demonstrated that the hospital’s response was false.
“We then challenged the hospital’s response by requesting an internal review, which led to them admitting that PAs did cover rota gaps in paediatrics and other departments.
“Did they deliberately try to cover up the situation? Or was this an administrative mistake? We’ll never know. Without Reddit, we would have just accepted the original response and never pushed for the internal review.”
Real-life results
And as for whether the request has had any impact? Yasmin confirms that the Trust says they’ve now stopped substituting PAs for doctors.
PA Project Watch continue in their work. “We’re now asking other hospitals to see if they have been substituting doctors for PAs, and uncovered further evidence: for example, Royal Berkshire sent us a spreadsheet of shifts where PAs had covered for doctors. This story was featured in the Daily Mail, although unfortunately without a credit.”
And perhaps as a further effect of this campaigning, doctors are now taking legal action against the General Medical Council, because while the GMC is planning to regulate PAs as Yasmin points out, “they could still technically do anything a doctor could do.
“This is the central argument of the Anaesthetists United legal case — they want the GMC to create a clear set of limits on the tasks PAs can perform, to avoid them being used inappropriately.”
But Yasmin’s clear where the problem lies and it’s not with the PAs themselves. “They’ve been let down by their leadership at the Faculty of Physician Associates, taken advantage of by the NHS, and thrust into roles for which they are unqualified and underprepared.
“Unfortunately, the NHS culture makes it really difficult to speak up about these issues. We’re trying to shine a light on what’s happening, and FOI gives us the power to do this — but we’re finding many Trusts are now refusing to answer requests about PAs, and we’re having to involve the ICO more and more.”
Thanks so much to Yasmin for sharing this important campaign. It’s great to see the journey from FOI novice to FOI expert!
It’s clear that the group now has enough knowledge to request an internal review to challenge an erroneous response, and to appeal to the ICO when an authority hasn’t met their responsibilities under the FOI Act — and we’re glad that WhatDoTheyKnow has been part of that learning process, not to mention the results that have come from it.
Video summary:
1 BBC: Misdiagnosis: Bereaved mum calls for physician associate role clarity
2 Manchester Evening News: Gran died after ‘physician’s associate’ left treatment in place for 16 HOURS longer than allowed
3 The Telegraph: Man died from rare heart problem after being discharged from hospital
Family of film make-up artist call for inquest after treatment by physician associate—
Image: implusq
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/RSS FeedIt’s our first ever podcast at mySociety! Heeey how about that?
Myf, our Communications Manager, runs you through all the stuff we’ve been doing at mySociety over the last month. It’s amazing what we manage to fit into just 30 days: you’ll hear about a meeting of Freedom of Information practitioners from around Europe; our new (and evolving) policy on the use of AI; a chat with someone who used the Climate Scorecards tool to springboard into further climate action… oh, and there’s just the small matter of the General Election here in the UK, which involved some crafty tweaking behind the scenes of our sites TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
Links
- TICTeC videos on YouTube
- TICTeC photos on Flickr
- Browse the TICTeC 2024 schedule, find slides etc
- Matthew’s post on updating TheyWorkForYou on election night
- Sign up to get an email whenever your MP speaks or votes
- Democracy resources and our future plans in Alex’s post
- Local Intelligence Hub lets you access and play with data around your constituency
- Matt Stempeck’s summary of the Access to Information meetup
- Our summary of Matt’s summary of the meetup
- Updates from all those ATI projects around Europe
- New in Alaveteli: importing & presenting blog posts; request categories and exploring csvs in Datasette
- Fiona Dyer on how volunteering for Scorecards upped her climate action
- Where to sign up if you fancy volunteering as well
- mySociety’s approach to AI
- Contact us on hello [at] mysociety.org if you have any questions or feedback.
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
0:00
Well, hello and welcome to mySociety’s monthly round-up.
My name is Myf Nixon, Communications Manager at mySociety.
0:11
This is part of an experiment that we’re currently running where we’re trying to talk about our work in new formats, to see if that makes it easier for you to keep up with our news. (more…)
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For a while now, there’s been a feature on WhatDoTheyKnow that lets you link your Freedom of Information requests to news articles, campaigning pieces or research papers.
We’ve recently made it easier to link your batch requests to these types of stories in the same way.
To celebrate, we’ll be offering free credit for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro subscribers who add links from their batch requests to the stories or papers that the requests have fed into.
For each qualifying link added during August, we’ll credit your account with a coupon that gives you a 20% discount on one month of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro.
Add several links, and you’ll get several coupons — so you could be enjoying that 20% discount for many months to come.
It’s easy to add them – go to the batch request via the dashboard and you’ll find the section in the right hand column. Just click on ‘Let us know’:
…and paste the URL in:
If there’s more than one story, you can click ‘New citation’ to add another one.
You’ll then see all the links to sources where the requests have been cited:
They’ll also be shown on the pages for individual requests in the batch:
If you’re a journalist, campaigner or researcher, we hope this is a useful way to give your stories some more readership (not to mention a nice inbound link from a high-ranked site for your search engine ratings).
More broadly, when you use this feature you’ll be helping us to understand what sort of impact the site is having, too. We’re always keen to spot news stories based on WhatDoTheyKnow requests, but papers don’t always cite a source or link back to the site, meaning that our monitoring is often dependent on a manual search where stories look like they might have originated with one of our users.
The way we’ve set this feature up, WhatDoTheyKnow users can add a citation to any of their own requests — but if you spot a news story that’s linked to a request that isn’t yours, please do contact the WhatDotheyKnow team.
They’ll assess it and input it if they find it to be valid. Our aim here is, of course, to prevent spammers from adding irrelevant links to the site.
Users of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, on the other hand, have the ability to add citations to any request.
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For a link to qualify for the discount, it needs to be a link to a specific story, report, paper or dataset where the information released in the FOI request has been used (ie not just a link to your organisation’s homepage, or a general overview of a campaign – though we’re always delighted to hear about these cases, too!).
We’ll cap the number of months on which you can claim a discount at 24, but we really do appreciate these links so please do add them even if it’s above the cap. We’ll apply coupons to any qualifying links at the end of the month.
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Image: Etienne Girardet
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WhatDoTheyKnow provides an easy way for anyone to exercise their rights under the FOI Act.
While requests are made by individuals, the information that is received through the site is automatically published, making it openly available to all and enhancing opportunities for the information released to inform public debate.
WhatDoTheyKnow may be viewed as a service, like a library, which provides access to information to anyone that walks through the doors, and does not hold an opinion about the information it holds. In this way, it reflects the ‘applicant blind’ principle that is woven into the FOI Act: this states that a person’s identity has no bearing on their right to information.
And, as with a library, different users may walk away with the knowledge they acquire, and apply it in many and various ways. They may form new views based on the factual information they have accessed. These views may lead them to believe that there is an injustice or abuse in the world that should be campaigned against. Another user may look at the same information and come to quite different conclusions.
WhatDoTheyKnow is not a campaigning platform
While the information received via FOI requests may inspire and inform campaigns — and often does, as evidenced by our many case studies — WhatDoTheyKnow is not, in itself, a platform for campaigning.
Our on-site guidance and user interface actively discourage users from including anything more than a clear, concise request for information in their use of the site. Where our attention is drawn to content that exceeds this remit, we remove it. One of the reasons for this is that we want WhatDoTheyKnow to help people of all kinds to make good requests that are likely to get information released — keeping requests concise, precise, polite and to the point all help to make it easy for authorities to respond positively to a request.
We are more than happy when requests are linked to from websites or news stories — indeed, via our ‘citations’ tool, users can link back — links back to the information supplied by public authorities can increase the credibility of evidence-based journalism and campaigning.
mySociety services as infrastructure
At mySociety, we run a number of different tools and websites. At first glance, they might appear to be quite disparate; but they all spring from a single principle: they are tools that empower people to be active within civic life.
TheyWorkForYou makes it easier to stay informed about our democracy, while WriteToThem gives a channel for communication with your elected representatives. FixMyStreet removes the barriers from reporting street issues to the authorities responsible for fixing them. Our tools around Climate provide the data and information people need to understand actions being taken by their local governments.
And then there’s WhatDoTheyKnow, which simplifies the process of exercising the rights to information conferred by the FOI Act.
When you see all these sites together, it’s easy to see that mySociety services provide a layer of democratic infrastructure, supporting everyone’s right to our foundational principles of democracy, community, and transparency.
Our tools are for everyone
That our tools are for everyone is an important point. We want our services to be open to, and used by, as broad a range of people as possible.
We don’t just provide a service to those who share our view of the world. Whilst we very much support campaigners making use of their rights under FOI through our service, as per our current policies, WhatDoTheyKnow is not a platform for promoting those campaigns or a particular point of view. The site is, like the FOI Act, open to everyone (so long as they abide by our house rules).
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Image: Philip Strong
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Summer is finally upon us, and though things are slowing slightly in the heat there’s been lots of amazing work happening on Access to Information across Europe this month!
NB: Our TICTeC community of practice is Global and we’d love to hear updates from our global members too in the future!
Without further ado:
FragDenStaat: are working on a long running investigation into a funding scandal at the Ministry of Education looking at the withdrawal of funds from critical scientists. More on that here
mySociety: are working on a new release of Alaveteli to bring some of our new features into your platforms. We’re also getting WDTK Projects as a self serve option into the Alaveteli Codebase, investigating AI for assessing batches and talking about our marginalised communities work at the Women’s Aid 50th Anniversary Conference. We’ve also finally released our Resource Hub, can you spot the pre-September event doc? Hint hint
Access Info: are working on legal reform projects with Moldova and Greece, as well as supporting Serbia with some legal challenges and convening a group of CSOs and activists around the 1049 Article.
SPOON: just got a win from the court in Amsterdam (more here) on rejections based on draft documents! There’s been some support from a minister who suggests the house waits to see what happens with FOI before talking about Abuse of the law and dealing with the complexities of things passing through the house when trying to ask for information about bill proceedings.
Transparency International Slovenia: have been Releasing their global integrity report with Ernst Young and going into conversation with Ernst and Young about what this means for Slovenian businesses.
Transparencia: is using FOI campaign to change 7 Belgian FOI regulations. Our actual campaign is on the federal Belgian law. We have collaborated with mainstream media to support that goal Transparence : ces documents que l’on ne veut pas (facilement) rendre publics – Le Soir and we presented to the press an FOI-investigation on fraud in covid-government contracts Des espions dans le Covid #1 : Vaccins périmés, manipulations et vidéos, le scandale belge qui éclabousse la France et l’Europe (blast-info.fr)ImamoPravoZnati: are sailing along smoothly this month; Users are sending their questions, receiving answers and they calculated they receive around 6% of all the FOIs sent in the Republic of Croatia to public authorities!
KiMitTud: Atlatzso (KMT’s parent company) have been using FOI to investigate fraudulent calls for vote recounts and uncovered that almost half the calls (114) for a recount in one constituency were made by the candidate themselves, not the vote counters.
Arthro5A: Vouliwatch (Arthro5a’s parent organisation) ran their first workshop around Access to Information to encourage journalists and CSOs to make requests and use their right to information. It was well attended and 18 CSOs signed up to the campaign afterwards. The event was supported by Access Info and Open Knowledge Germany.If you’re in our Network and Community of Practice and have something to share for August monthnotes – drop Jen a line!
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mySociety is currently helping to support knowledge-sharing between organisations and individuals who run Access to Information projects around the world, in a community of practice.
Several such folk were in London for our TICTeC conference last month, providing a perfect opportunity to come together in person and share insights.
Matt Stempeck of the Civic Tech Field Guide has written the discussions up in full (he also deftly explains the slight difference, terminology-wise, between Freedom of Information and Access to Information) and you can read his account here.
Meanwhile, here are the top-line topics that were under discussion:
- Logistics How do you facilitate a community of very busy people, spread across multiple countries and speaking different languages — and how do you ensure that interventions are timely and productive? The group discussed which types on online communication and touchpoints work best for them; how to ensure topics are relevant to their immediate needs; and on which platforms it’s possible to talk about challenges just as freely as successes.
- Measuring impact Are there consistent metrics we could be collecting across all ATI projects to demonstrate and compare impact? What are the individual issues experienced by each project that impede the collection of such metrics?
- Governments What are the issues that groups face within different countries, with differing levels of governmental tolerance towards ATI?
- Engagement How do projects educate the public about their rights to information, and encourage more of them to use these rights?
- Journalism How can ATI projects work with newsrooms or individual journalists to discover stories and, incidentally, also help spread awareness of ATI? In which ways does the ATI process not fit well with journalists’ needs?
- Funding One area where the network can offer useful peer support is in swapping notes over where they source funding, and other potential channels of income. Some funders were also present, and so were able to give their valuable perspectives too.
If any of these topics spark your interest, hop over to Matt’s account for the full details.
mySociety is supporting the international Access to Information community of practice alongside the Civic Tech Field Guide, Access Info Europe and Open Knowledge Germany.
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Banner image: James Cameron
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Alaveteli is our platform that anyone can use to run a Freedom of Information site in their own country or jurisdiction.
As the number of requests grows on an Alaveteli site, it can become increasingly difficult to find released information that you’re interested in.
You can search, but the more general the term, the more likely that you’ll pull in results where the term is mentioned incidentally rather than being directly related to the information released. Or you can browse by authority, but that’s more fiddly when you want the same information from a range of authorities.
There’s also the issue that people new to FOI might not have a clear idea of what to ask about. Freedom of Information is great because you can ask for anything, but as a newcomer that can feel overwhelming. You need some direction to know where to start.
Request categories allow us to curate related requests to bridge the gaps mentioned above.
Here’s an example of a category on WhatDoTheyKnow that compiles successful Freedom of Information releases related to the British Post Office scandal.
Categories can be created in the admin interface via the Requests > Categories menu item.
Request categories work in a similar way to the current public body categories – in fact, as part of this development we’ve revamped the underlying code so that it applies to both!
At their core, they’re composed of three things – the title, body (where we can add explanatory content), and requests grouped by a tag.
Notes can be added to call out key information, and categories can be added to headings to create a layer of hierarchy. As part of this development, we’ve also improved notes so that they can be more easily styled with some preset colours, and added rich text editing to improve the formatting of longer notes.
We’ve started building up some interesting categories of requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, but we’d love to hear which ones you’d like to see.
If you’re interested in how the development unfolded you can take a look at the related work on GitHub.
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Banner image: Garmin B
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Alaveteli is our platform that anyone can use to run a Freedom of Information site in their own country or jurisdiction.
We’ve added new functionality that allows Alaveteli sites to highlight blog posts on the homepage, so they’re more visible. In this way, Alaveteli sites can not only help users with the ‘how’ of making an FOI request, but also show, in a very tangible way, the ‘why’ — especially if the posts are highlighting impactful uses of the site.
Previously, Alaveteli had a basic way to pull in an RSS feed of blog posts. These were only available on the blog page (/blog), which often does a disservice to all the great work that gets written about.
We wanted to better signpost the blog from other pages in Alaveteli to celebrate great FOI use, and help users understand how a seemingly simple FOI can go on to have an outsized impact.
When the site runner configures a blog feed, posts are pulled into Alaveteli and cached in the database. This makes them available on the homepage. Here’s what that looks like on WhatDoTheyKnow:
They’re also visible in the admin interface via the Tools > Blog Posts menu item.
At present only the title, URL and publication date are cached in Alaveteli. These records are intended to be “pointers” to the canonical URL of the article hosted on the external blog service.
In the admin interface, blog posts can be tagged to indicate their subject matter.
As FOI requests and authorities can also be tagged, this allows the blog posts to be highlighted in the sidebar of appropriate pages where there’s a matching tag. So, if someone’s browsing requests or visiting an authority that deals with the climate emergency, for example, they’ll be shown relevant blog posts – hopefully making them more visible to people who have already displayed that they have an interest in the topic, and giving those people a bit more contextual knowledge.
In future we’d like to make these posts more visible, by importing header images and a short summary, and give the ability to display some posts when there isn’t a direct tag match.
You can read about the initial design and subsequent conversation and pull requests starting at mysociety/alaveteli#6589.
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Banner image: Patrick Perkins
