NHS

The greedy rich get richer, the genuine poor get poorer, nothing will change.Never been any different.

A daughter of a friend worked for the NH S and was made redundant. A month or so later she was hired on a contract ( more money) to do exactly the same job. Enough said !

Far too many chiefs and not enough Indians according to my daughter who has been a cardiac nurse for over 20 years. Not sure why you're finding it hard to talk to your sister though. You don't have to agree on everything surely.

Bankhurst - your sister is correct, and why on earth you are contemplating not speaking to her beats me. Public service organisations should be flat and responsive to the public they are meant to serve, whereas the NHS is tall (meaning many layers of management) and bureaucratic and that means that different layers of management can hide behind others - quite disgraceful really - always knocking off for breaks and lunch, ensuring that they're on the right side of flexitime, etc., - the medics and nurses however, who do the 'real' work - yes the work the NHS was intended to deliver, struggle to take a break and suffer from moral injury as the vocation they innately feel they are following is thwarted at every corner by management (take the debacle with PPE for instance - management make a blunder and frontline staff face a life and death situation). Bankhurst you need a more open mind - maybe a sit down with your sister and a willing ear might help.

What she says is so so true. Too many managers from outside the NHS, not enough staff on duty. Bring on the staff, bin the managers. What's your beef with that ????

i have thought this for years, get rid of some of the pen pushers and employ more nurses as they are the ones that keep the hospital running...i know we need the doctors and surgeons but after they have done there bit it is left to the nurses to do all the work on the wards.

Don't fall out with your sister over something neither of you has any influence over, just different opinions. As others have pointed out you don't know the half of it.

FlexibleFriend

I would have agreed with her.

Me to. I know others who work in the NHS who say this and have been saying it for years.

This thread is doing my head in, it’s the stuff of myth and legend. Please read the facts.
www.statista.com/statistics/488819/england-nhs-qualified-managing-staff/

Your sister is right

This is for you Casdon

Thanks Alegrias1, that raised a smile!

She is right! It's not the managers who have to run around finding beds and theatres and having to decide which cancer patient has to be cancelled but there are a lot of wasted meetings and decisions taken. one example from before I retired. I had to attend a series of meetings with other professionals - physios, consultants, nurses. Meant my clinic was cancelled most of afternoon when meeting was on as people had to travel into Edinburgh. Was about supplying incontinence pads, what to do about people with continence problems and treating the cause rather than supplying pads. There was a speaker from another city which had a better and less expensive system. In the end - higher up managers decided not to do what we had agreed was the best and less expensive way to treat patients properly - we being the staff working with the patients and wanting the best outcome. So all the meetings involving all the staff members were a complete waste of time and money and I expect to this day nothing has changed. That's probably what your sister means.

I worked for the NHS for 28 years and was often appalled at the waste. Once 1000 computers were ordered and when they arrived they were put in a basement storage area awaiting distribution to a relevant department. They were still there 2 years later.
I also heard from poorly paid nurses that when a nurse left they were often replaced by a Bank nurse with inferior qualifications who got better pay.
You would weep if you knew how much money is just poured down the drain in the NHS.

Management is needed in every walk of life, it is perhaps the quality of the management that should be scrutinised and the tasks that the management do. After all it is a management decision that flies in a locum surgeon from another part of the UK or from overseas to work in a hospital and pays this highly qualified individual an eye watering sum of money for their expertise because no-one has trained up from the front line staff or the more recently qualified staff. I am not talking about specialists here. The same happens in local GP areas as well. We had one for 3 weeks to cover a GP on holiday.

I ran a department in a university building which had been built as a PFI. We had a private company managing the building: cleaning, catering, replacing lightbulbs and even specifying the catalogue we had to use to buy stationery. All of these were super expensive, we cut our costs by buying in stationery and sandwiches for meetings elsewhere but had to do it very quietly. I know that after I left there was a crackdown and the costs went right up again.

Another instance of waste was when my husband had a heart problem and was in hospital foe three weeks. Much of that time was spent waiting in an expensive specialist ward for a detailed cardiac scan. They'd bought the multi million pound scanner but only one consultant was trained to use it and he was only free to use it on Fridays - hence a wait of more than two weeks.

Surely cc that’s a matter of understaffing rather than waste? I’m sure you’re not suggesting that the purchase of the machine your husband and others needed was a waste of money?

It would make sense to ensure that the member of staff who was trained was seeing people who needed the scan on a Friday, surely?

Unfortunately your sis is sadly right. My mum nursed from wartime to 1970s and she used to say there were"too many chiefs and not enough Indians" even then! That unions ensured repeat contracts with wasteful suppliers, sinful throwaway packs of dressings etc ensued ensuring these massive contracts stayed intact ad infinitum. Fancy curtains and quote " foldarols!" Everything contracted out laundry/cssd-instrument sterilisation/uniform laundry taken home!!! The list went on! It was the case that she said the patients were almost an afterthought....I personally knew of a "manager" who bragged about how much he was paid and how very little was expected of him! He was a right pain in the ar5e, he turned out to be an active paedophile and thankfully ended up in clink, but it was noted that the lack of his supervision and scrutiny enabled his offending to carry on in the children's hospitals he worked in (area manager you see!)

My elderly neighbour was rung by a nurse from our city hospital last week inviting her to have a CT scan.
My neighbour -who is not poorly- asked why…The nurse replied that, seeing she had had one many years ago, would she like another one…?
My neighbour declined in anger, asking….”Whatever for? How can you call a healthy person for a Ct scan when currently there are thousands of sick people waiting for scans and tests?”Needless to say…the nurse rang off!

I trained as a nurse in the NHS. Worked newly qualified as a staff nurse, then junior/senior sister. Ward work. I did 28yrs total. Now retired from nursing and working in my own small business with DH.

I think you may want to give your relative a second chance. She is right in many ways. There’s a lot of money to be made in NHS procurement/management/outsourcing. Millions of £ spent on agency workers right across the board thanks to Govt. cuts throughout.

And when it’s all privatised the cost will be astronomical for very little in return. It’ll all go to the foreign investors and fat cats with off shore accounts who don’t even pay taxes in the UK.

It’s pretty much over for the nhs.

Let me just say that managing a budget in NHS is not easy as the main component in a caring profession is the most unpredictable of every thing, humans. Budgeting around unpredictability makes it some what impossible as you just don't know what is going to come through the doors. We do need more money and things do need to change. I've set up costly medicines to give to patients that have agreed to treatment after every thing has been explained and they have given written consent to them changing their minds at last minute, the costly medication has then to be destroyed as once prescribed for a patient cannot be given to another. You can budget for winter only to find the weather has a big impact to the services on offer and staff may not be needed as patients cannot get to the appointments. The biggest waste can be when patients do not attend appointments and do not notify clinics so they can give appointment to waiting patients, this costs NHS millions as staff are waiting around and ancillary services, electricity for heating and lighting, etc wasted as are on for no one. Ambulances are inappropriately used, A and E are used for none emergency reasons when other more appropriate services like Pharmacy, Dentist, etc could be used. Budgeting is not easy as people's expectations are high. I'm not saying your sister is wrong, but what I am saying is that there is more to things than she has knowledge of and Yes I have worked for NHS for 40 years, including having to learn Budgeting.

I don't suppose the NHS is perfect and, like other organisations, there are probably areas that could be run more efficiently.

However, I think this idea that too much money is spent on admin is especially popular in those circles that wish to dispense with the NHS and introduce even more commercial enterprises into the mix. We have recently seen, with the pandemic, how ineffective and negligent contractors mishandled issues such as PPE and test and trace. While people within the non-commercial system were saying that a more localised and personal approach should be used to test and trace, as it had been found to be more effective, this was ignored.

It is fashionable to say that administrative staff serve no useful purpose but if these staff are not available, it falls to doctors and nurses to carry the burden of admin tasks when they should be concentrating on patient care.

Apparently, the money that goes to the NHS is significantly less than is found in some other European countries, such as Germany.

Annaram1

I worked for the NHS for 28 years and was often appalled at the waste. Once 1000 computers were ordered and when they arrived they were put in a basement storage area awaiting distribution to a relevant department. They were still there 2 years later.
I also heard from poorly paid nurses that when a nurse left they were often replaced by a Bank nurse with inferior qualifications who got better pay.
You would weep if you knew how much money is just poured down the drain in the NHS.

Rather hard on bank nurses! All nurses are now trained to the same level (BSc), unless you meant specialist nurses who have received post-graduate training. There are specialist nurses on the bank, too, as there are lots of reasons for nurses doing bank work. Agency nurses cost even more (but still have the same qualification).