There are many things wrong with the NHS. This is just one example I’ve witnessed and it happens over and over again.
In an acute district general hospital there is a small team of administrative staff. There are just four people who seem to do all the work and amongst them, two work for one service and two work for another. Let’s call them team A and team B. Managerially the teams are quite separate. They have to work closely together and they have done for some years so they know each other well. The job isn’t frontline clinical. Patients’ lives are not at stake but it is important. Together they deal with many clinicians – junior doctors, consultants, GPs and nurses, and many important others outside of the hospital including patients’ families. The roles are vital and statutory. No hospital could function without them.
For whatever reason, two people in team B applied for other posts, luckily (you’ll find out soon) in the same hospital. I don’t know the detail of why they wanted a change. It doesn’t matter that much although two going at once creates a suspicion there is a problem. It is said that the managers above them don’t know much about the work they do and rarely visit the office. Both team B folk had done it for a while and I’m sure needed a change. They are good at what they do but they’d probably achieved all they could in those roles and they’re both young enough to want to learn more and do more. There was no route to a promotion within team B. I don’t know if they’re getting more money in their new roles. If not, at least they’re doing different work and learning new things. The fact that they were leaving was known for long enough. I don’t know if their managers knew they were looking for other roles. They should have had an inkling so that would have given them long enough to consider the resilience of the team, to recruit and fill their vacancies. Admittedly, two of them going at the same time does create a problem in training new people, particularly if, as is said, their managers couldn’t do the job themselves.
A notice about a leaving drinks get-together was put on the office door. The day of leaving came and went but the two members of team B haven’t gone. Whilst normally both of them worked full time, since they left, one or both, have remained in the office. Why? Because their managers have asked them to. Why? Because the recruitment process has been too slow and there is no-one to do the work, let alone train new people.
After a few weeks of this I could see the service was starting to creak. All those people that the service interacts with were getting frustrated by the phone not being answered. People from outside the hospital, including patients’ families were being stressed by not being able to get answers. Instead, they were phoning busy ward staff, who couldn’t help. Outside agencies were threatening to tell the press how difficult things are at the hospital, in this vital, statutory service.
When there’s one person working in team B that person can’t get through the tens of messages on the answering machine, without the phone ringing again. There are more queries coming through than they can answer and deal with, and so it snowballs, day after day. The impact on the two team B people, who wanted to move to new roles is enormous. I can’t believe they haven’t gone off work with stress, due to their frustration and utter disappointment.
The knock-on effect to the two members of team A, who share an office but who can’t do the role of team B, because they’re a different team and have their own vital work to do, is huge. They have become friends over the years, but they can’t help them. It’s causing team A stress. The flow of work in the tiny hot noisy office is massively impeded. It is creating more work for all.
A new starter did come and observe the processes this week. Doing so took out-of-play one member of team B, to show the new starter the ropes. The new starter has been told they cannot leave their current role, let’s call it, in team X, in the hospital, to start their work in team B, because they’re needed still too much in team X where, due to it being the end of the financial year, and whatever else, team X is understaffed and can’t afford to lose that person. I should mention, my understanding is that, team X, whilst it has an important role, it is not a statutory one. It is an important preventative role and if it was paused briefly the likelihood of harm would be low. I doubt it is performing to it’s expected standard anyway – what service in the NHS is? I don’t like accepting low standards of care, and would not normally want to knowingly allowing standards to deteriorate but there’s a priority of needs here, and in my book, Team B’s role is more vital than team X, but it seems that’s not been considered.
The current situation is that both team A and team B staff members are thoroughly fed up. There is some planned long term leave for one of the team A folk. I don’t know how the remaining team A person will survive if that post is not recruited into, to cover that leave, which could begin any day! With team B on a knife edge of coping there is little resilience and high vulnerability for a vital, statutory service.
If it were me in team B, I would have lost all respect for the line managers. I would think team B has a pretty good claim for constructive dismissal. I would go home pent up with the impossibility of the day’s work and regretting the stress put on others because of it. I don’t know how new starters get trained and inspired at present. It is of course in the interests of Team B to show new starters the ropes, but it’s near impossible for them to do that, and do the job, if both members of team B are not in the office that day.
The NHS has a terrible habit of not rushing to recruit when staff announce they’re moving on. It saves money, is the logic, I think. Perhaps, in the short term it does but it puts a lot of pressure on those that remain and is not conducive to good employment practices. I don’t believe it saves enough money for the hassle and impact it causes. It may not be a money saving issue. It may just be that internal bureaucracy is such that getting an advert out isn’t easy. When staff move within the same organisation, the ability of the organisation to hold them back is pretty poor employment practice. The accusations that higher managers know insufficient detail about the work a team does is commonplace, and no doubt those managers are caught between their own rocks and hard places.
I would love to know of places where this doesn’t happen and where there are policies to protect staff, and services, from such a mess – essentially exemplary employment practice, a true valuing of staff, and a determination to provide good services, rather than, what seems to be the norm – squeeze until the pips squeak.
ShaunOConnell.com 