09.04.08
Learn something!
Before commenting on something.
A valid lesson for the majority of people over on the BBC comments board re the NHS today.
A typical comment (and at time of writing top on the “recommended comments” list):
The problem with the NHS is there are far too many “Managers and administrators” and not enough beds and nursing/care staff.
Utter crap.
Anyone in the NHS round here at the mo knows that the lack of admin support is killing us. We have 9 physios as of today (hello new staff member). And 1 admin lady supporting us. She has to deal with all the admin, all the phone calls, dealing with staff sickness (IE cancelling stuff), sorting out management stats and that, plus prolly some more. She is paid shamefully little. If she wasn’t there we couldn’t do our job. This regularly happens, she’s ill or on her hols the appointment system struggles with no support; no patients can get in touch, new appointment letters can’t go out, complaints aren’t dealt with and so on.
But on the stats the news see she’s “management”.
We lost our team leader (“manager”) and now have someone helping out from another team so is unable to give us all the attention we prolly should have; she’s good but not one of our team, nor a musculo-skeletal specialist.
We also have a manager above her who is currently running about 4 services and is rushed off her feet. This will now be worse as her PA (another “administrator” so obviously no worth to the NHS) has left now. She struggles a bit to keep up with the day to day news of the team (not her domain) but that means that stuff we’re worried about she doesn’t get to hear. If she deals with stuff we don’t hear about it either.
So the lack of the team leader is prolly the single biggest area where we feel we’re missing out. No news goes up (that we hear about) and no news comes back (that we know about). And that is the reason we’re all hacked off. Why bother working your heart out to get no feedback, praise or whatever?
But there’s a quick “too many managers” comment to make. Get a new record, that one’s old now.