Managers and whistleblowing

[Terry Skyrme]

Our Campaign has been criticized recently for picking on individual managers, We have been accused of being anti-managerial. Personally I am anti-management; I am against management by an overloaded, overpaid hierarchy of managers who have separated themselves from day-to-day contact with patients. These managers are not bad people; it’s just that their daily experience is one of constant meetings with each other where the needs of the organization becomes more important than the needs of the patients. Why are there so many managers and why are THEY replaced as soon as a vacancy arises in their midst? In the Crisis Team we have been 50% down in social work staff for almost a year now, with no replacements, Yet as soon as a Deputy Service manager post becomes vacant it is filled immediately. I wonder why front-line staff have been downgraded yet no top mamagers have taken a salary cut. You would think they might want to lead by example.

Grass-roots staff have for months raised the issue of the neglect of patients who are currently placed in Hostels at Hellesdon Hospital. ” Hostels ” used to be a pre-discharge ward managed by a team of 10-12 nursing staff, NSFT originally intended to close aaaaaaaaaaahostels and began to get rid of the staff in the new service strategy, However, because of the bed crisis decided to keep Hostels open for male patients, but not reinstate the necessary staffing levels. The ” Hostels ” is now an unstaffed, unsupervised ward containing some severely ill patients whose care and treatment is unsafe. These patients are not properly medicated and sometimes go missing. Patients smoke in their rooms putting others at risk and the whole place has an air of neglect with no regular cleaning taking place. Now a major error has occurred in the administration of medication. You have to ask why a situation like this would not be a priority for management to resolve. When such issues are raised by staff the standard response from Team Leaders is to tell staff to complete a Datix i.e. an official report of an unsafe incident. Numerous Datixes have been completed by staff on the Hostels. NSFT even boasts that it has one of the highest rates of reporting of such incidents. Yesterday in a training session we were told that we have a legal duty to whistleblow. What do you do when you keep blowing that whistle and no one hears it?

[James]

Terry, I don’t think it’s a question of them not hearing it, but rather hearing it and ignoring it. The current administration is fighting for its life and the needs of service users come way down the agenda.

Michael Scott was meant to bring a level of stability to the chaos but he just walks around with the air of a man who doesn’t really know where to start. It’s not just a mess, it’s a mess in which the culprits are covering their tracks. How is one man supposed to sort it out? The CQC really needs to step in.

The Hostels sounds like something out of a Victorian horror novel. This is not what Nye Bevin had in mind when he set up the NHS!