Thoughts

Written on 10th August: Questions wise, I think the second question seems the most interesting to me however it will need to be handled delicately as opinions on this may offend some people. However it would also be interesting to look at the NHS budget after the EU leave vote. Then, knowing from experience that there is a staff shortage in some, maybe all, areas of the NHS, it would be interesting to see whether a staff increase that is talked a lot about actually meets the rising demand of patients.

Questions

So I wrote this on the 9th October and forgot to upload it! So I'm catching up on things I've written now xD

So I've decided on a few questions to choose from after doing a bit of research. I've decided to focus on the NHS for the research as that's what I'd most like to do my EPQ on. Some of the questions I'm looking at include:
1) Has the NHS budget been sustained in correlation to the patients and illnesses it needs to treat?
2) Should the NHS charge for self-inflicted illness or injuries?
3) Is there an increase in NHS staff compared with the amount of patients?
 
The research I did came up with this so far:

1) Budget is £116.4 billion. NHS England is managing £101.3 billion.
2) I can't find specific statistics for this until 26th August but will state them once I can.
3) NHS England employs approximately 1.5 million people and caters for a population of 54.3 million. NHS scotland employs 161,415; NHS wales employs 84,000 and NHS NI employs 66,000.  Again some stats I can't find out until the 26th August as that's when they'll be released.

Ideas

So I've decided to do the EPQ (Extended Project Qualification) which is a research based As level that helps towards critical thinking, research and report writing skills. I've been thinking about what to do for this for a while and haven't really come up with anything that I'd really want to do. Until today.

We had a meeting in college explaining what the EPQ is about and what we'd need to do over the Summer (this included starting up a blog to write about what we've been up to) and one of these things is picking a topic which for me would have to be maths. I love maths and find a lot of it very interesting and also think that there's potential for a lot of different routes to go. An example of this is to look at the maths behind pokemon a JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) which has a lot of maths in it in order to calculate damage done and weaknesses to different types and a lot of other things. Another idea I had was to look at NHS funding and possibly how leaving the EU may and has affected NHS funding. I have family who work within the NHS and it seems like a feesable thing to research and also very interesting.

So that's my 2 main ideas at the moment and hopefully with some research I might be able to properly decide on a more specific topic and eventually a question.