Post by Dave Plowman (News)Post by FredxxPost by AndrewAt least 20% of the NHS workforce !! (who aren't frontline
workers).
So you think this 20% don't work, and superfluous to the running of the NHS?
My experience of government cuts in the non-frontline areas is that
everything gets less efficient and where frontline workers work on
non-frontline matters. But hey.
I've had quite a bit of experience of the NHS over the last few years.
Generally extremely positive. But the one thing that could be improved is
the admin side. I've had the letter confirming and appointment - and
giving the details of where to go - arriving after the appointment.
I've had a day's pay lost due to attending an appointment for a test -
only to find that the appointment was for the test results, but they
hadn't organised the test!
I've had another day's lost pay due to organising a day off and paying
for one of our sons to go into a day long music class, to allow us to
get urgent results of an MRI brain scan on our eldest son, only to
receive a phone call 15 minutes before the appointment to tell us that
they should have called us last week, but all the week's clinics were
cancelled as the consultant had decided to take the day off.
I've had booking Wednesday off work to take my son to an appointment
(that he'd been waiting 8 months for), only to receive a cancellation
letter on Saturday, so I decided to work Wednesday and take half of
Monday off, as I had the freedom to juggle my hours around. I phoned on
Tuesday to see when a new appointment might be available, only to be
told that his Wednesday appointment had not been cancelled and if we
missed it, we would have to wait many more months to get one. So half a
day's pay lost as I no longer had enough availability to juggle my hours
enough. When I got there, they told me that the letters were generated
automatically by the computer when the appointments were cancelled and
so they had no idea how that letter could have been generated while the
appointment still existed!
I've had what should have been a case of dropping my wife off, waiting
for 15 minutes and taking her home become a 3 hour wait (if I'd known I
could have gone home and worked in between, as we only live 5 minutes
away), because the doctor that was due to give her injections in her
joints had rushed out to pick his sick daughter up from school, but
hadn't bothered to tell anybody!
I've had having to take our children to my parents at 6 am to get my
wife to a 6:45 am appointment for an operation, waiting with her for
hours, giving up and me going home, but being on edge waiting for a call
back to collect her, only for them to take her to theatre at 5:30 pm!!!!
I've had taking my sister for treatment, 30 people being given the same
appointment time, us being the first there and her being the last seen,
as they put the notes in the tray as patients arrived and then worked
down from the top.
I've had multiple times of taking my wife to the eye hospital for
appointments between 8:30 am and 10:15 am. Not once was she seen before
12 pm, on one occasion it was 4:15 pm - an the clinic officially closed
at 1:30 pm!
The organisation is atrocious. The treatment is usually good - although
one consultant tried multiple times to get my wife to consent to
clearing up her symptoms (dizziness and peripheral vision problems), by
blinding her in her left eye. The problem was eventually resolved when a
Neuro-opthamologist, seeing her for the very first time (after 2-1/2
years of being seen by other people), immediately recognised the problem
and put her on medication for 3 months.
Post by Dave Plowman (News)Things like that suggest it isn't admin top heavy. But the reverse.
My wife worked in the NHS and there was sufficient admin, however there
were far too many, totally useless, managers.
She used to work as a Community Psychiatric Nurse. The team consisted of
4 full-timers and 1 part-timer (her), plus a manager. A senior manager
visited the office twice and found no-one there. On further
investigation, she found that my wife was seeing more patients in 18
hours than any of the others were in 37. It turned out 3 of the 4
full-timers were saying that they were working in clinics at the
hospital and going shopping for the day, while the 4th was struggling
mentally, having just been diagnosed HIV positive.
Of the 3, one was made to pay back 10K and moved back to the team she'd
been borrowed from and 2 moved to other trusts before any action could
be taken. The 4th, the only one deserving any sympathy, was sacked.
Their manager was moved to another department (a promotion) and my wife
was forced to spend another 18 months fighting to get her proper pay
grade, as she'd been wrongly banded lower than all the full-timers and
the (new) manager ignored the discussions that had taken place 12 months
before!
Later, in another position, my wife experienced a senior manager
receiving praise and an award for managing to find a new base for three
teams, allowing the three existing building leases to expire. The new
building was (and did) house 90 staff, 70 of which were Community staff
and so needed to have their cars with them - the building had 6 parking
spaces and all the surrounding area was no parking or 30 minute parking,
yet they needed to attend the 45 minute morning meeting and spend hours
of each day writing up patient's notes in the office.
They did eventually procure some extra parking some distance away, but
staff would not use it, as three of the (predominantly female) staff
were accosted while walking to or from there in the dark - one actually
being injured in fighting the attacker off.