Public services - wave of redundancies?

SarEl

I am afraid this is happening up and down the land. It isn't always the councils to blame! The speed at which funding and programmes are being cut is something they can't keep up with. One week they are dealing with £ XXX,XXX non specific cuts and trying to balance the books (which at least allows them to plan what they have to do) and the next week they get a letter saying "By the way - this specific funding has gone as of yesterday..." Add to this that internal HR departments are already overstretched and redeployment case officers inundated. That's if the last government didn't "persuade" them to outsource HR already ("our target is to see people in XX weeks..."). I don't want to make excuses for poor management, but at the same time, it's often forgotten that the people having to make these decisions are not in a comfort zone either. A friend of mine had a whole swathe of her staff funding cut on the spot on a Friday afternoon, by the government. Her Saturday was spent working out what this meant, and what she could salvage. Her Sunday was spent phoning staff at home to tell them that their jobs were redundant, or in some cases at risk. By Tuesday she was doing it all over again with another group of staff.

shays_mum

LondonDiva wrote: »

Good news is that becqause it's evil managers and administrators, not clinicians or consultants (holding the service to ransom IMHO), no frontline services or quality of pt care will be affected.

Our clinicans don't even know how to re-load a photo-copier or change a toner without atleast 3 of them involved, let alone type a letter/make appointments for patients - how can that not affect Pt care or frontline services?
Can't speak for managers & yes! there does seem to be loads of them, but as an admin for the NHS, i don't see how departments like purchasing,facilities,accounts etc etc would run without non-clinicans running them!.
I def agree that the NHS should be focused on frontline patient orientated care & clinicians should be left to get on with their jobs, but how much of their time would be spent better on the actually care/service, then the associated paperwork that goes with all jobs -public/private sector alike.

NellieNewbie

Deleted - moved to another board

Miss_Penny_Pincher_2

shays_mum - having just spent a week in hospital I can't agree with you more! From my experiences there, nurses already seem bogged down with administration tasks, taking them away from vital patient care so to add this burden onto clinicians, consultants and other medical staff seems ludicrous.

SarEl - what a terrible position your friend was put in. Have to say it seems that way in my local authority now. Not so extreme but one week we will be told one thing then extra cuts will be announced and so the next week the number of redundancies will have been hiked even higher and this has happened at least 4 times now.

woody01

Frontline healthcare should never be cut. Nurses are worth their weight in gold, and simpy do not earn enough.

Local government and civil servants on the other hand have been leeching from the system for years, and i am actually glad their bubble is about to burst.

CFC

Too many 'non jobs' in local councils, along with the 'jobsworths' that manage them.

zewest

For those saying that cuts won't be for ages anyway, the local council where I work has just finished it's second round of redundancies. The first was in mid 2009.

zewest

CFC wrote: »

Too many 'non jobs' in local councils, along with the 'jobsworths' that manage them.

Whilst this may be true, it's never these jobs that go.

A_nice_fellow

I don't really care if public services get worse (although I'm not at all convinced that they will), I would rather keep more of my money.

purple12

A_nice_fellow wrote: »

I don't really care if public services get worse (although I'm not at all convinced that they will), I would rather keep more of my money.

Well, that's fine for you I guess but there are a lot of people who rely on public services. It's a very broad category and I can't imagine that there is anyone who won't be affected by a cut in the front line delivery of public services - because make no mistake - a cut in admin has a massive impact on the delivery of public services.
I work in a local community mental health team. We have just lost admin roles and vacancies have not been filled. We are stretched to breaking point at the moment and still there is a whiff of job losses around. That means we have longer waiting lists, we have had hospital beds available to us cut, we have people who actually need hospital treatment who can't access it because the time it takes to see them and there are no beds in the borough anyway.
We are moving people to residential care homes miles away because there is no money to provide the services nearby.
So it is all very well saying 'I don't need public services' but we can judge a culture and society on its treatment of her least fortunate citizens - and quite frankly, it doesn't augur well for this government.
I can appreciate there need to be cuts but it has been done in a very thoughtless manner to be honest. Managers are looking at baseline of making quick cuts rather than managing and thinking through cuts so that service delivery can be least affected (of course it will be affected but currently, it has just been a haphazard 'lets get rid of all bank/agency staff to save - regardless of what role they were filling'.

Oh well, better stop ranting - not good for my blood pressure And must get on with the work I brought home for the weekend because there aren't enough hours in a working week to complete.