During the radical redesign, highly trained and experienced front line nurses had their salaries cut and were made redundant or forced out of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) while the mental health trust had hundreds of vacancies and NSFT’s management knew caseloads would be unmanageable.
Older, experienced clinical staff were dismissed, some literally, as ‘dead wood’ while patients were promised better services that managers knew could not be delivered (we will be publishing more on this shortly).
As the wages and jobs of front line clinical staff were cut, the personal salaries of the hubristic management which ignored warnings from front line staff went through the roof. As part of the scandalous radical restructure, Amy Eagle is today back at NSFT with a great big pay rise as though she has no responsibility for the radical redesign.
NSFT’s managers have cut the wages of the front line staff of whom the trust has a shortage whilst giving themselves pay rises. There is a surplus of managers at NSFT. So much for market forces or ‘clinically-led’. Or even personal responsibility.
Our campaign was founded more than five years ago by caring front line staff who believed that the incompetent cuts were causing preventable deaths. The subsequent doubling of the number of deaths at NSFT and repeated CQC failures confirmed that those fears were more than justified. The people of Norfolk and Suffolk have suffered the Mental Health Mid Staffs.
Amy Eagle can’t just type a quick sorry on Facebook on her phone and expect us to forget what she did. Quality of lives have been ruined. Careers were destroyed. And the damage continues to be felt.
People buried their loved ones. We will remember them.
The re-employment of Amy Eagle as Deputy Chief Operating Officer of NSFT is a disgrace.
