Sid Bonkers said:
I heard recently that a consultant at a large hospital found to his dismay that he was the only doctor on call over the recent back holiday. I doubt if there is a hospital ward in this country that is not understaffed, it is a very real problem that will inevitably end disastrously for some I fear.
Mrs Yorks will start her 8pm til 8am shift in the haematology labs this evening. She has to run three separate labs, single handed. A&E, emergency surgery and maternity are all told that the labs provide a 24 hour service. What they are not told is that there is only one person there.
Many years ago all the Labs in Pathology, haematology, biochemistry, histology, microbiology etc had lab staff, seniors, and managers. They were all in the labs, in white coats, working at the lab benches, even the senior chief, head of all the Labs in the Pathology.
One day someone thought it a good idea that the senior chief and the individual lab managers were moved out of the labs into separate office well away from the laboratories. They immediately protected themselves with a ring of secretaries and personal assistants. So, the overall productivity went down and the staff numbers went up. Furthermore, because they were now separate from the labs, they needed some sort of interface so they used the seniors who now spend 50% of their time in meetings, resulting in even less productivity. They are so remote that Mrs Yorks refused the senior chief entry to the labs because she didn't know who he was, despite him having been in position for 6 months. Comments by the managers like,
'oh this is new, what does it do?' meets replies like,
'you should know, you ordered it'. More worryingly is the fact that they are also expected to be fully familiar with the operational procedures and be expected to step in and use it, but they can't. They rely on stand ins, locums, at £500 a day.
Has anything at all been achieved by this? Well not much. Most of the hospital management don't even know that the labs are there. When the new hospital was planned, all the plans had been signed sealed and delivered and Bovis Homes, who had never built a hospital, got the contract. Someone in the Path Lab saw the plans and asked, where are the Path Labs? No one had included them in the plans. Well, not to matter, they hadn't even included a laundery. It gets worse, much worse but as all the staff are reminded, whistle blowing is a sackable offence. To quote my mate's sister who is a personal admin to a consultant,
'no one seems to do anything'. I can well believe her.
