Nursing the news along.
A masterpiece of prose from the BBC this morning. 525 words designed to make you think that your health may be affected by your stupidity in electing a Con-Dem government – and they don’t use the word nurse once.
The Conservatives promised they would protect ‘front-line’ services. The BBC is fighting a rear guard action likely to make you think they are breaking their word.
So, from their Health ‘reporter’, Nick Triggle we get:
The NHS is bracing itself for a “brutal” round of cuts – and staff fear they are in the firing line.
Staff note, not nurses, not Doctors. That outreach co-ordinator for the Lesbian-Gay Alliance of Tattooed Drag artistes who want cosmetic surgery may find that her job is at risk.
Several major hospitals have already said posts will go and more announcements are expected soon.
Posts note not nurses, not Doctors. The secretary to the outreach co-ordinator for the etc., etc., may need to find something more useful to do with her time.
To help fund the cuts, the BBC has learned a £2bn pot is being set aside in England to pay for one-off costs, such as redundancies and redeployments.
Not being thrown out penniless in the summer snow then?
Managers were told by the Department of Health before the election to hold the money back from the front-line.
Oh, you mean that this was a planned Nu-Labour cut? Why didn’t you say so then, so coy…’before the election’.
Staff working in hospitals are particularly vulnerable because much of their budget – two-thirds in some cases – is accounted for by labour costs.
And where ‘labour costs’ is a euphemism for caring nurses plumping pillows and holding the hand of frightened elderly patients before surgery, I don’t expect to see any change; those outreach co-ordinators would be well advised to check the vacancies in the packing department at Argos before the rush starts.
Southampton Hospitals Trust is shedding 400 posts this year and 200 next.
Posts again – any nurses included in that number? Nah, you’d have had them sobbing all over the six o’clock news if there were, wouldn’t you.
And in a briefing to staff, seen by the BBC, bosses warned there could be similar levels of cuts from the 8,000-strong workforce in years to come.
‘Work-force’ this time, inventive. Got a Thesaurus have you?
Andrew Lansley told the BBC last week the coalition government wanted to see efficiency savings, but claimed this did not necessarily equate to cuts.
Only ‘claimed’, you can’t be sure that he meant what he said? Shall we wait and see before we cry wolf? After all:
Meanwhile, Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, which includes Addenbrooke’s, and Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital have both asked staff who want to leave to put themselves forward for a pay-off.
Self explanatory.
But the existence of the £2bn fund in England has prompted speculation that staff are set to face the brunt of the measures.
Speculation – is that what the BBC reports as news these days? Care to tell us who’s speculating?
Michael Sobanja, of the NHS Alliance, which represents staff working outside hospitals, agreed. “I think it is pretty clear headcount will drop. The NHS is facing a pretty brutal time.”
‘Headcount’ – that Thesaurus is working overtime.
John Lister, of Health Emergency, a union-funded pressure group, added: “It is unavoidable staff will be hit and, in turn, patients. We are braced for a series of cuts, which will be the worst for many years.”
Ah two Union reps, well they would know wouldn’t they. Perhaps taking money out of nursing patients to pay the wages of speculating union reps might be a good place for the axe to fall first.
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1
May 17, 2010 at 12:21 -
‘Southampton Hospitals Trust is shedding 400 posts this year and 200 next.’
and how does SHT justify having these posts on its establishment in the past if they can be dispensed with so rapidly now the squeeze is on ?
don’t ask because we won’t be told!!!!!!
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May 17, 2010 at 12:34 -
I wonder if they will cut the Cleaning Service? There’s one that could well go unnoticed.
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May 17, 2010 at 12:43 -
“And where ‘labour costs’ is a euphemism for caring nurses plumping pillows and holding the hand of frightened elderly patients before surgery, I don’t expect to see any change…”
That’s a pity. I’d like to see the above actually start…
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May 17, 2010 at 13:18 -
Bearing in mind that the NHS is the third largest employer in the world, behind the Chinese Red Army, and the Indian National Railways, I am suspecting that a genuine daring and honest cut of waste staffing level in that Socialist State Leviathan would solve the national debt in one go.
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May 17, 2010 at 13:20 -
Further to my last comment. Get rid of the BBC in total, it would also help solve the national debt crisis.
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May 17, 2010 at 14:39 -
What services are a genuine luxury that now, due to straitened economic circumstances, ought to be removed from the NHS catalogue; IVF? Tattoo removal? Sex-change operations?
Or to look at it another way what basic level of services should NHS hospitals be required to provide and whatever is left over can be deployed how hospital management see fit? Asking ‘What should the NHS be doing?’ has been put off for far too long.
What responsibilities could the NHS (and State in general) be denuded of; five-a-day crap. Promoting the use of towel nappies. Collating pointless statistics for a centrist Government that has no ability to discern what is and isn’t relevant so instead devours information on every metric it can think of.(And yet hospitals can still manage to kill people in large numbers…)
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May 17, 2010 at 14:44 -
I’m still reeling from an encounter with the ‘placement officer’ responsible for finding a care home for a relative with dementia.
She turned up an hour late for my appointment (having visited the hospital coffee bar on the way) pushed a handful of brochures towards me and told me to ‘Pick one I liked and call her; she was running late and had to get her child from school’.
On my next visit she filled in the application form for a place and associated funding while chatting constantly to a colleague about her 3-year-old’s birthday party. The careless mistakes she made have taken three months and £5,000 so far to put right, and there seems to be no channel for complaint.
If she’s in the firing line, I’ll be waiting to pull the trigger.-
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May 17, 2010 at 16:20 -
Placement officer
She probably cannot read or write properly.-
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May 17, 2010 at 19:09 -
Doing a rough count of the number of those casting comments in to Anna’s wonderful forum I calculate that about 90% of the literate beyond a one-mile radius of the Radcliffe Camera are here.
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May 17, 2010 at 19:15 -
I ‘ad er spellin’ test terday.
Kwestchun wun wus ‘owdyer spell ‘elicopter’?????
I fink I got it rite.
I sed it started wiv a ‘haitch’.
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May 17, 2010 at 19:29 -
You are right Pericles, and boy do they educate me! See, you just made me find out what the Radcliffe Camera is….didn’t have a clue, I didn’t!
I am immensely proud of all my commentators, they are doing a sterling job finishing a prematurely truncated education – 50 years later, but better late than never, and more than that, they are all great fun. I look forward to hearing from them every day.
I just wish I had half their wit – and as for Ms Smudd, well, she leaves everyone standing, even using the slowest computer I have ever been introduced to, she will come back at you with a superb pun before anyone else has dusted their keyboard.
A big round of applause for you all.
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May 17, 2010 at 20:18 -
It is believed that when one faculty disappears the body compensates by sharpening other senses & faculties.
Being now old and infirm, blind in one eye and for decades now a stranger to the Hollywood Smile, I find my loins need girding prior to any posting I may even consider making. Other infirm readers of this blog may feel similarly intimidated and it is for that reason alone that I recommend this ritual prior to pressing the ‘Submit’ button: remove dentures and prise free any semi-masticated Werther’s Original stuck therein before replacing dentures; if wearing a glass-eye, persuade it from its socket by any practical means (I find a warm teaspoon to be the kindest tool) and give it the once-over with a bit of spit and the least-grimy hem of one’s apron and pop it snugly back into its socket; switch off Jeremy Kyle/Jeremy Springer* and, if one’s computer is driven, as mine is, by the treadle-pedal of a Singer Sewing Machine, shake off one’s once-fluffy-now-encrusted fluffy mule and work up an effective blend of scaley sole and rheumatic ankle and all should be well. It may be some hours before Google agrees to connect but, hey, it often works for me so keep that ankle flexing.
I find that eventually my efforts are rewarded either with an entirely different thread where clever people comment day and night or the thread I’ve most recently been on has been commandeered by some or other Botanical Garden just to prove that tumbleweed can be grown in cyberspace.
* it’s either one or the other at my house and boy, have things changed since I was a gel.
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May 17, 2010 at 17:48 -
Meanwhile, Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, which includes Addenbrooke’s, and Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital have both asked staff who want to leave to put themselves forward for a pay-off.
………….
Of course they’ve asked staff if they want to leave – Addenbrookes is supposed to find jobs for those Papworth employees who wish to be ‘absorbed’ into the Cambridge-based ‘centre of excellence’. -
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May 17, 2010 at 19:44 -
One thing that could be done is to move all the nurses, OTs & physios who left the bedside & clinic to become ‘managers’ back to what they trained to do. A cost neutral-ish way of improving patient care, even ‘productivity’ whatever that is in healthcare.
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May 17, 2010 at 21:58 -
Lurked here for a wee while, but had to register to say: Ms Smudd, your post had me choking with laughter, which was most welcome after a particularly apoplectic-inducing Monday working for the NHS.
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May 19, 2010 at 10:44 -
Continuing the theme I see that currently on the BBC they are illustrating what appears to have been a R5 discussion on the ‘Public Sector Pay Freeze’ with a picture of two front line medial staff. No meme pushing going on there at all.
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