NHS redundancies: What meeting and where is it ?

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/health/fears-nhs-jobs---patient-6750169

Now, why would Unison call a meeting with the Leader of the council Colin Lambert present and the media yet keep it quiet from the public ? because I am sure many of us would have been there to show OUR support against this !

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/bosses-trust-running-hospitals-rochdale-6755022
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Well said. I too have little problem with 'purely administration' being 'farmed out'. That sort of essential work is better carried out elsewhere. A trimming of 'purely administrative work' from top to bottom wouldn't go amiss as these areas tend to escalate unwittingly. The same at the MoD and other places. More emphasis on 'ground works' and more resources where it is vital - at the the rock-face. Perhaps then we shall have a 'service' that begins to care again and where the 'customer/patient' is again the most important asset.

Reading the comments on your own medical records can be quite amusing, or distressing and insulting. It's interesting to see the prejudices and inane attitudes of some of the people that were supposed to be looking after you.

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/hospital-patient-agony-24-hours-6757758

There are two separate issues here, both coming to light at the same time. For the outsourcing of payroll and HR, that is just a logical continuation of the outsourcing and offloading of non-essential functions. The cleaning has been outsourced for years, now with the famous G4S, and the security and car park monitoring by Mitie (these deals happened under the previous government, if anyone wants to get political).

As for HR, like Hinch, I have the opinion that they provide a poor service and are very poor value for the number of highly paid staff that make up the department. It is bizarre that all the activity comes form the deputy director and leaves everyone wondering why the director is needed - that would be a saving. The department continues to meet its sickness targets, even after they have been adjusted to make them possible, and the NHS staff survey results, published last week (noticably unannounced at Pennine Acute as usual) are still poor. I expect that the very senior HR staff will not be outsourced.

As for the payroll department, they are actually very good. I suppose it is the nature of the job, to be accurate and responsive. Whether that service can be provided cheaper, I don't know, but other trusts using the external service seem to get along fine.

The medical records change is something else. Planned new electronic patient record systems will remove the onerous and inefficient need for massive amounts of paper notes to be stored, retrieved, processed and transported across the sites. It is just progress to something better that requires fewer staff. It is still a huge blow to staff affected, but the timescale will give opportunities elsewhere.

Pennine are still very short of money needing to hit financial targets to achieve the pre-eminent goal of foundation status, desperate to get costly sickness down, and for staff to buy extra leave to save a bit more money. There is no getting away from the fact that targets that risk jeopardizing that goal are the driving factors in decisions. John Saxby was brought in as Chief Executive expecting to oversee that being achieved, but is retiring with that still some way off and still not certain to be achieved. The new chief executive will no doubt have that as the prime goal too.

Hi Hinch,

I've not been far way, but busy in the new job.

There was talk that one of the only ways to find the £70million or so that would be required to bring North Manchester General's workhouse-based building stock up to modern standards would be to sell of a large part of that site for housing.

It will be interesting to see how the new Chief Executive's influence works out. One slightly worrying observation is that on a well-publicised website giving examples of unfairly-treated and victimised staff  (http://www.ajustnhs.com/case-histories-of-victimised-nhs-staff/) there are 12 detailed documented examples from the NHS, and 3 of the 12 are from Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Trust, where Dr Gillian Fairfield has been Chief Exec since 2008.

More information has come out recently about another push for Pennine Acute staff to apply to leave voluntarily under the MARS scheme. This is more generous than the miserly previous voluntary severance offer. It will be interesting to see how many apply to leave. The whole idea is to try to save money, as is the renewed scheme for staff to buy extra leave, ie. take time off unpaid.