Saturday 15 May 2010

It's begun!

Here we go, a week after an election and health boards in Scotland are talking about cutting staff. The numbers given so far add up to 1876 and this does not include all boards, some are only talking about percentages.

Where are these cuts going to be made? You guessed it, Nurses, Midwives and other front line staff. But the good(?) news is that there will be no redundancies but there will be no replacing staff who leave or retire. So despite what the chief executives of the health boards say, more and more will be done by less and less. However, they have promised that services and patients will not suffer.

Does any of this sound familiar? I wrote this piece in January;

Recently we had the horror of Mid Stafford where over 1000 people may have died unnecessarily - why? Well here is a quote which may help point you in the right direction

"Over the years, many clinicians had noticed deterioration in the standards of patient care, which became particularly acute approximately three years ago when major cutbacks were made in staffing numbers. This included a ­savage reduction in the number of nursing staff."

When will they learn?

3 comments:

Doctor Zorro said...

They don't learn because the people who make these decisions in one trust will get jobs elsewhere taking their perverse ideas with them like a virus to infect other trusts.

Nurse Anne said...

Not only are they cutting qualified staff but they are saddling the few qualified staff left with pharmacy's job, the domestic and the ward clerks jobs. We are supposed to help them you see. But who can help us?

Grumpy Old Ken said...

The new Derby hospital has loads of staff. Sadly mostly clerical.