Big Society, Big Bullshit
Mar. 6th, 2011 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianI am made of HATE.
Apparently, the NHS wants to have unpaid volunteers do the work of ward clerks in the midwifery service. This includes breastfeeding advice, filling out paperwork and taking blood pressure. The latter two disturb the almighty hell out of me. Look, I get that a person can take their own blood pressure. I get that ... most people ... can more or less fill out paperwork. However, I have been working in the NHS for a very. Long. Time. I can see how good people are at filling out their own paperwork, never mind somebody else's. They don't check spelling of names. There is every chance of screwing up. And paperwork errors can be fucking fatal. So please, someone, tell me what this bullshit is?
I am a rarity in the NHS. I am an admin who cares about her job as more than just a source of a paycheque. I understand that every letter I get out in a timely fashion, every patient I help move into an earlier free appointment slot, every charge through the hospital I do to nail some fucking registrar to the floor to get them to book a patient in for necessary and sometimes life-saving therapy? That is, in its own small way, saving a life or at least helping make somebody's life better. I get verbally abused by patients on a regular basis. I get overworked, underpaid and desperately underappreciated. But I have worked in the private sector, both in healthcare and not, and at the end of the day, I have discovered that I would still prefer to be in NHS work than anywhere else. I get the warm fuzzies, okay? Sue me. If I'm going to earn my living largely doing tasks a well-trained monkey could do, I'd rather do it and know I'm doing good, rather than just being some damn donkey following the carrot dangled by her corporate masters, mmkay?
But this? This Big Society bullshit? This isn't going to work. I am a rarity! Most people don't give a shit, and the ones who do still need to work for a living! The kind of work they're talking about is not the sort of thing you can pop into for a couple of hours on weekends! It requires a regular eight-hour day at least, and how the hell are people supposed to do that, even if they want to, and still have a job? Either they're volunteering during working hours because they're unemployed, in which case it would be in their best interests to actually get a job (because the benefits upon which Big Society is hinging their volunteer service? That's not enough to live on), or they've already got a job and would have to volunteer nights, when they've had a hard day at work and don't have the energy or mental capacity to do the kind of job I'd want to see in a healthcare professional. Because make no mistake: hospital admins are trained healthcare professionals.
This is where society at large should quote a certain RP character who I sometimes still miss to this day: "I don't want some little oik like me having access to my medical records!"
There's also a murmur about the current coalition government not demanding checks in some cases when a job involves contact with vulnerable adults or children? And yet they want volunteer workers to come into hospitals and deal with pregnant, childbearing women and infants? Normally I would say that no one is sick enough to interfere with a newborn, but I've read newspaper articles about some guy raping a three-year-old and I now no longer put anything past humanity.
The point of all this is that the NHS doesn't need the kind of cuts the coalition is trying to make. It sure as hell doesn't need outsourcing the blood donation service to a private company (because WTalmightyF?!?). What it needs is to re-evaluate the money it is already spending and put that money to better use. The management structure is shit. Let's start with that. There are too many managers - and half of those managers don't do a gods-damned thing (my technical line manager is never in the office because she is wandering the grounds with a cigarette half the day, or so goes scuttlebutt, and tends to vanish on half- or full-day leave without so much as a word to anyone). There are too many white-collar bozos running around the place trying to figure out where all the money goes, and they must see that the money that should be spent on front-line admin is going to their unnecessary salaries, but because they don't want to lose their jobs, they blame front-line admin and ensure their job security as they try to 'shape up the service'. There's a process at the hospital I'm in now that they're calling 'natural wasteage', which means that if anyone quits or retires? They're not hiring anyone to fill that vacant position anymore. They're just going to pile the work on the remaining admin staff and cause more money and time to be wasted as people get stressed to the point of ill-health and end up going on long-term sick leave, which leads to more 'natural wasteage' and a vicious cycle of the service falling apart. The NHS needs to pare down its middle management and use the salaries of the useless mid-line managers who do jack fucking squat to hire more front-line admin who could actually keep the service running smoothly. It's not that hard!
I repeat: I am made of HATE. And now I have to go grocery shopping. And then I am going to go slaughter the hell out of some darkspawn just to vent the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
Apparently, the NHS wants to have unpaid volunteers do the work of ward clerks in the midwifery service. This includes breastfeeding advice, filling out paperwork and taking blood pressure. The latter two disturb the almighty hell out of me. Look, I get that a person can take their own blood pressure. I get that ... most people ... can more or less fill out paperwork. However, I have been working in the NHS for a very. Long. Time. I can see how good people are at filling out their own paperwork, never mind somebody else's. They don't check spelling of names. There is every chance of screwing up. And paperwork errors can be fucking fatal. So please, someone, tell me what this bullshit is?
I am a rarity in the NHS. I am an admin who cares about her job as more than just a source of a paycheque. I understand that every letter I get out in a timely fashion, every patient I help move into an earlier free appointment slot, every charge through the hospital I do to nail some fucking registrar to the floor to get them to book a patient in for necessary and sometimes life-saving therapy? That is, in its own small way, saving a life or at least helping make somebody's life better. I get verbally abused by patients on a regular basis. I get overworked, underpaid and desperately underappreciated. But I have worked in the private sector, both in healthcare and not, and at the end of the day, I have discovered that I would still prefer to be in NHS work than anywhere else. I get the warm fuzzies, okay? Sue me. If I'm going to earn my living largely doing tasks a well-trained monkey could do, I'd rather do it and know I'm doing good, rather than just being some damn donkey following the carrot dangled by her corporate masters, mmkay?
But this? This Big Society bullshit? This isn't going to work. I am a rarity! Most people don't give a shit, and the ones who do still need to work for a living! The kind of work they're talking about is not the sort of thing you can pop into for a couple of hours on weekends! It requires a regular eight-hour day at least, and how the hell are people supposed to do that, even if they want to, and still have a job? Either they're volunteering during working hours because they're unemployed, in which case it would be in their best interests to actually get a job (because the benefits upon which Big Society is hinging their volunteer service? That's not enough to live on), or they've already got a job and would have to volunteer nights, when they've had a hard day at work and don't have the energy or mental capacity to do the kind of job I'd want to see in a healthcare professional. Because make no mistake: hospital admins are trained healthcare professionals.
This is where society at large should quote a certain RP character who I sometimes still miss to this day: "I don't want some little oik like me having access to my medical records!"
There's also a murmur about the current coalition government not demanding checks in some cases when a job involves contact with vulnerable adults or children? And yet they want volunteer workers to come into hospitals and deal with pregnant, childbearing women and infants? Normally I would say that no one is sick enough to interfere with a newborn, but I've read newspaper articles about some guy raping a three-year-old and I now no longer put anything past humanity.
The point of all this is that the NHS doesn't need the kind of cuts the coalition is trying to make. It sure as hell doesn't need outsourcing the blood donation service to a private company (because WTalmightyF?!?). What it needs is to re-evaluate the money it is already spending and put that money to better use. The management structure is shit. Let's start with that. There are too many managers - and half of those managers don't do a gods-damned thing (my technical line manager is never in the office because she is wandering the grounds with a cigarette half the day, or so goes scuttlebutt, and tends to vanish on half- or full-day leave without so much as a word to anyone). There are too many white-collar bozos running around the place trying to figure out where all the money goes, and they must see that the money that should be spent on front-line admin is going to their unnecessary salaries, but because they don't want to lose their jobs, they blame front-line admin and ensure their job security as they try to 'shape up the service'. There's a process at the hospital I'm in now that they're calling 'natural wasteage', which means that if anyone quits or retires? They're not hiring anyone to fill that vacant position anymore. They're just going to pile the work on the remaining admin staff and cause more money and time to be wasted as people get stressed to the point of ill-health and end up going on long-term sick leave, which leads to more 'natural wasteage' and a vicious cycle of the service falling apart. The NHS needs to pare down its middle management and use the salaries of the useless mid-line managers who do jack fucking squat to hire more front-line admin who could actually keep the service running smoothly. It's not that hard!
I repeat: I am made of HATE. And now I have to go grocery shopping. And then I am going to go slaughter the hell out of some darkspawn just to vent the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!