Queens Park.

[lettie]

I am also glad that this has been highlighted. It is also unfair to ask nursing staff to leave busy, acute wards in order to do portering jobs, rather like asking a porter to assist with a bedbath.

The wards are all currently understaffed, if a nurse was to leave an acute area for 15 minutes or so and a patient had a cardiac arrest, sudden collapse or other acute episode and there weren't enough staff left on the ward to deal with a situation such as these (which often require several staff), whose fault would that be? Would it be the porter's, the managements, the nurse's?????

The blame would fall on the nurse in charge of the ward for releasing a member of her staff to do a non-nursing task..

The NHS will never have enough money allocated for staff whilst people remain silent. The government would rather plough millions into reorganisations which do not work than put money into actual hands on care of patients. If the reorganisations worked then why have they had to reorganise so often?????

People are all too happy to sue and complain when things go wrong but they never ever write to their MPs to comment that the staff were running around like idiots and that there were only 2 qualified staff looking after 20 odd poorly patients. No wonder mistakes get made, dead bodies get left on wards, patients receive inadequate care and staff become demoralised and leave.

[Margaret Pilkington]

Having been left the NHS for 4 years i can see that nothing has changed, well, yes, actually it has......it seems to me it has got a darn sight worse.
We were always chasing our tails when I was there....but we had some hope of getting straight sometime. I endorse all that Lettie says in respect of reorganisation...it is good money thrown after bad....and with nothing to show for it. The government crows about how much money it ploughs into the services, but it is all going on the wrong things.

[Gayle]

Next step is for them to engage a consultant who will collate data on the porters work rotas and work achieved. The consultant will probably get paid twice a porters monthly salary for five days work and produce a report. The report will then tell the administrators that they need to employ an extra porter but they won't be able to afford it because they've spent their budget on consultants.

[Wynonie Harris]

Originally Posted by lettie

The NHS will never have enough money allocated for staff whilst people remain silent. The government would rather plough millions into reorganisations which do not work than put money into actual hands on care of patients. If the reorganisations worked then why have they had to reorganise so often?????

Totally and utterly correct, Lettie, as Margaret and anyone else who works or has worked recently in the NHS will agree.

The fact is that Gordon Brown has actually doubled spending on the NHS since 1997, yet NHS trusts face a deficit of £1 billion this year. That's a crisis and no amount of patronising speeches by Patricia Hewitt can alter this fact.

We've reached this turn of events because this government is obsessed with gimmickry and spin. Instead of using the money wisely to achieve long-term benefits, they are desperate for headline-catching initiatives that, as Lettie says, involve ill-thought out reorganisations.

A prime example is the plan to digitise all patient bookings, records and prescriptions - the largest civilian IT programme in the world. This grandiose programme is years behind schedule and the cost has trebled from its initial estimate to a jaw-dropping £20 billion. Meanwhile, those at the sharp end, be they patients or staff suffer. What a farce!

[Madhatter]

Look on the bright side, if they hadn't spent it on that wynonie harris, they'd have wasted it.