NHS

It doesn't matter.
It's an interesting and polite discussion.

No response to all these messages from Bankhurst.......

Inishowen:
“I'd like to know why consultants can't do NHS work but CAN do private work.”
I was appalled when I heard this was happening locally, till I was told that the consultants weren’t allowed to operate in the NHS hospital as the ITU and recovery area were being reserved for Covid patients, and they were therefore operating on NHS patients in the private hospital (my friend was one of those having her hip done there, on the NHS).
You are probably aware that by no means all NHS consultants do private work, particularly outside the big cities.
The question of working solely in the private sector if they do private work comes up repeatedly, but if the consultant works the hours they are contracted to in the NHS, then surely they should be able to do what they want in their own time, whether that is looking after their family or working in the private hospital.

Too much trouble Calistemon and some NHS kitchens appear to have no means of cooking and are only able to heat pre-prepared meals (or not, in the case of your local hospital). How are people supposed to recover from illness or surgery without proper nutrition? Meals have to look and smell tempting to get some folk to eat but that seems to take second place to convenience. It can’t be economically sound either, not that that should be the primary consideration.

I remember it well and wondered what happened to the local fresh produce which worked out cheaper,
Germanshepherdsmum.
He visited a hospital here.
Food is now being brought in to a local hospital and isn't even hot when it gets to patients, as well as being practically inedible. I know from the horse's mouth (well, he's not a horse in fact).

Does anyone remember James Martin trying to change the way NHS cooks worked? Buying fresh veg to make soup and other meals more cheaply (and nutritiously) than the packet/frozen stuff they always used? Didn’t get anywhere, they went back to their old ways and procurement methods.

Like others I too have worked in admin in the NHS, and definitely too many managers and also wastage but you as a little cog in a very big wheel it isn't always as easy as people think to report, as it isn't obvious as such but when you look at all the tiers of management and their admin teams I am sure it could be scaled back on but as others have said they would be daft to cut their own jobs. But they will pick up on something daft like how much stationery departments are using , but they will have repeated meetings to discuss it and come to no decision about how to solve the problem, each meeting would have minutes done typed sent to all those present not realising how wasteful this is.

My mums next door neighbour always had the opportunity to try out medications, get antibiotics and dressings.
That's because her daughters partner was an nhs manager, apparently.

I would have agreed. The first place to be scrutinised should be the “procurement department “ where they place orders over and over to the same suppliers, (even when the costs go up.)If you ran a business like that then you’d go bust in a couple of years!

In my ex mother in law’s day people working on the wards routinely helped themselves to dressings etc to take home. She didn’t consider this was stealing. It went unchecked.

Three members of my family have worked in the NHS for over 20years they are appalled at the vast amounts of money wasted on a daily basis and the total inefficiency of the many layers of management . They can't wait to retire

Personally, I find it very upsetting to see the NHS struggling under such difficult conditions. I and my DH have both had such exemplary medical treatment which I find
hard to fault.
I got quite annoyed when we were requested to 'protect the NHS' when quite rightly the NHS should have been there to protect us !
Jeremy Hunt was in post for some years and now is criticising much of what's going on. During his tenure a large scale study was carried out as to what preparations and procedures should be put in place if we were confronted with a pandemic. It appears that none of the results from this study were implemented. If this has been the case, PPE would have been at the ready from the start. Where does the blame lay for this being ignored?
Why is it that successive governments have thought the solution to solving the NHS problem is to throw money at it.
Please, please, please - somebody sort it out!!

At our school, the managers are paid so much money for spending their time in meetings, that the school is short staffed on vitally needed, but poorly paid, TAs.

Sadly I do agree with her

Having worked in local government for a few years I’ve never doubted that a good part of my taxes are wasted.

Just like local government. We went through 'Business Transformation' In an office of six teams each with a Team Leader and Deputy Team Leader to oversee 4 plebs. Then the main Manager of the whole office with Deputy Team manager. Then bringing is a new computer system(third one in ten years) Consultants on a thousand pounds a day and heyho it went 'live' and a tremendous amount of employees were overpaid so they created a vacancy for an 'Overpayment manager' you couldn't make it up. In my humble opinion, this is where your taxes go, supporting righthanded people who doesn't know what the lefthanded people are doing.

Your sister is right, and what about the fraud that goes on in the NHS ?

Bankhurst, some 'interesting' comments above! The real point, though, (surely plainly obvious) is that the NHS needs far more money right now. It will continue to cost more into the future, as our population increases - and lives longer in poor health and old age.

Just a quick follow on from my above post, many of my team had in excess of 24yrs service which meant they got 2yr pay (1 month per year of service was, at the time the maximum redundancy payout), many were earning £50-60k/yr, they walked away with this lovely big payout, set themselves up as consultants and came back to the NHS as consultants a week later earning anything between £400 and £800 PER DAY!

I used to work for a mental health organisation (part of the NHS) and I did all our finance work.

We weren't a clinical team but more an education team, we sat between the Department of Health and the Trusts who deliver care to the public and we educated them on how we wanted MH services to look and be rolled out, long before MH became 'fashionable'.

Amongst other things we produced official documents and ran conferences, which can be expensive but we justified every penny.

Knowing we were spending public money I was always conscious of making sure we got the best value possible. In the 11yrs I was there we never once received a Freedom of Information request but I knew that anyone could ask what we spent or cash on, so I was rigorous with recording exactly what we'd spent and could tell anyone anything from how many pens/pencils we'd bought in a year, why and how much each one cost, through to the breakdown of costings for any given conference or even staffing costs because I was aware that anyone could ask at any time.

Every organisation, public or private, has rules governing how money is spent, tendering processes, specific people with authority to sign off on purchased, 3 quotes system etc and as much as I didn't have the final say in these things I was heavily involved and could block any purchase if our Standing Financial Instructions (financial rules) were not being adhered to.

Even though I say so myself, we did a great job, I know this because if we hadn't, MH wouldn't be getting the attention it does now, but my whole team was made redundant because David Cameron said at the end of 2010 that the NHS didn't need so many 'managers' and that the trusts could run themselves. What a lot of good that was! Health authorities were disbanded and because the trusts couldn't do what the HAS had done for them, the Dept of Health had to introduce another new body to do it for them after having just paid out £millions in redundancy payments.

Management should be managing these issues then.

It's very easy to look at other people's jobs within any organisation and wonder what they do, how they qualify and whether they work hard. They may think the same about your job. What to me is worse is the appointment of consultants who charge exorbitant fees and also
bring their colleagues in.

I’ve got to agree with your sister. I think we’re got too many on crazy stupid wages and not just in the NHS look at footballers bankers etc list goes on. Yes ppl deserve a wage to fit the job but often wonder who makes up their wages.

spabbygirl

Maybe she does have a point, you won't see much evidence of lavish spending in the frontline staff, but what I think really excessive spending is huge amounts on private health providers like Serco etc. who pay consultants figures like £10k a day. the service would be better and cheaper if it were all in-house, as Labour plant to do

Labour expanded PFIs which were introduced by the Conservatives - they didn't reverse them.
Another disappointment.

Of course some management is needed.

However, I have seen at first hand the frustration of medical staff, ward sisters etc who are perfectly able to make the same decisions they had been making competently for years but then had new managers put over them in charge of decision making about their wards.

I found that very interesting. Having worked in a school for 30 years as a TA I know that money that’s given from the education dept. for special needs children didn’t always get used for that.