Archive for January, 2010

Costs of surgical procedures and operations

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

If you are due to go into hospital to have surgery then you might be interested in how much it costs regardless of whether you are going NHS or private.

In can be hard to find out what your treatment actually costs but I’ve found out that many of the major health insurance companies publish lists of how much they will pay your hospital for your surgery.

As the health insurance companies have special deals with the hospitals the prices they list will be a lot cheaper that it would be if you paid for the surgery yourself, but it will give you an idea of how much your treatment actually costs the hospital.

You can even compare how much each insurer pays for your treatment. This is because a standard classification of procedures has been created by the Clinical Coding and Schedule Development (CCSD) group.

If you know the code of your procedure then you can compare prices using the insurers schedule of fees. However note that some of the schedules just list the surgeon / anaesthetist’s fees, whereas other include the total cost including hospital fees.

You can easily search for your surgery using either the CCSD code or just by typing in the procedure name.

For example W8520 is the code for a type of arthroscopy of the knee. Currently Cigna would pay up to £575 for the surgeon’s fee and £250 for the anaesthetist’s fee. This is a total of £850 for the surgery.

If you paid for this surgery privately then it could cost you around £3000 – but note that this price includes all your hospital fees as well (and of course some profit for the hospital!).

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Finnair vegetarian VLML in flight meals

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Recently I took two Finnair flight. One was 10 hours and one 3 hours. I wanted the vegetarian (VLML Vegetarian Lacto-Ovo Meal) meals. It was not possible to request them when booking the flight tickets on the Finnair website so I had to phone their call centre.

I told the lady that I wanted the VLML meal. It is best to be specific and say VLML rather than ‘vegetarian’ if you want this specific meal as there are several other types of vegetarian meal available (such as VGML Vegan and AVML Asian vegetarian). She confirmed that she had requested the meals and I should shortly receive an email confirming this.

A minute later I got the email. I printed this out so I could take it on the flights as proof of my request just in case there were any problems.

Meal 1 – Flight 1

This first meal (maybe lunch but it is hard to tell when you are travelling through timezones!) was pasta, mushrooms, carrots and some kind of tomato sauce. There was also a salad, some fruit, and some lemony mushrooms. As always on these flights is a roll of white bread. It tasted pretty good for an airline meal.

finnair vegetarian vlml in-flight meal

Meal 2 – Flight 1

Dinner was gnocchi in tomato sauce (with a whole tomato as well) and broccoli which all tasted good. A slightly odd jelly and the usual bread roll finished it off.

finnair vegetarian vlml in-flight meal

Snack – Flight 2

The snack on my second flight was falafel in rice, with some kind of tomato sauce. A bread roll and a boiled sweet was given as well. I noticed that this meal was both VLML and VGML – meaning it was vegan.

finnair vegetarian vlml in-flight meal

General experience

Over the past year I’ve had 6 vegetarian VLML meals on Finnair flights (all economy BTW). On 5 of those meals the VLML meals was brought to me without them having to remind them. They obviously have a record of which seats have ordered the special meals (if you stick in your allocated seat you are more likely to get your requested meal). On just one of the flights did I need to remind them that I had ordered the VLML meal.

The quality of the meals is pretty good for an economy airline meal. It was easy to order the meals over the phone – but it would have been even easier if the option was integrated into their ticket booking system.

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Converting file extensions to lower case

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Recently I needed to convert a large number of photo file extensions to lower case. Doing this manually would take ages and wouldn’t be a fun job.

I wrote a quick batch file to look through all the sub-directories from the one it is executed from and change selected file extensions to lower case.

To use this script place the below code in a file called lowerCaseExtensions.bat. Put the batch file in the directory containing the files that you want changed and double click on it.

The script will loop through all the files in the directory, and will loop thought the files in all sub-directories and will change jpg, png and gif extension to lower case.

@echo off
setlocal
pushd .

goto :skip_functions

:toLower
	cd %1
	echo Processing %1
	ren *.JPG *.jpg 2>&1
	ren *.PNG *.png 2>&1
	ren *.GIF *.gif 2>&1
goto :EOF

:skip_functions

for /f %%i in ('dir /b/s/ad') do call :toLower %%i

popd
endlocal

You can easily customise this to change the file extensions of other file types to lower case.

This has been tested only on my Windows XP computer so I’d suggest you test it first on some copied files before you let it lose on your real ones.

Even if you aren’t specifically interested in the functionality that this batch file implements you might find it interesting to see how to implement a simple callable function in a batch file (:toLower), and how to implement ‘for’ loops.

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