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Some time ago the Health Service Journal looked at staff morale & why NHS employees are more cynical and more critical of reform than in other areas of the public sector.

There has been a lot written about plummeting levels of confidence in the management of the NHS, especially the disconnect between clinical staff & managers. We now have 70% of doctors slagging off what is happening in the NHS says Ben Page at MORI.

Since then we have had the staged pay awards & of course the “it would be funny if it wasn’t so painful” MMC / MTAS circus which has doctors up and down the country ready to march.

It is not just doctors who are complaining. As mentioned earlier, the RCN has highlighted the letters sent to MPs by disgruntled nurses & other civil service staff have already been on strike.

And I mentioned the report from the IPPR a couple of days ago which highlights the lack of involvement of front-line staff in NHS policy.

So there you have it, the government has been prescient & working for the past 6 months on ways to improve the NHS: encourage doctors & nurses to smile. After all their focus groups have told them so.

No one is going to deny that staff attitudes have an effect on patients. But what are needed are examples of actual consideration & improvements in their working lives, not records of chocolates handed out or bowls of sweets.

THE government is considering a new scheme to improve the National Health Service: encouraging doctors and nurses to smile at patients, writes David Cracknell.

The proposal was presented at Thursday’s cabinet meeting as the culmination of six months’ work by the brightest minds in Downing Street. A cabinet source said: “One of the things that came out of the focus group discussions was that they didn’t feel nurses and so on gave the impression that they cared enough. They felt, for example, that they should smile more.”

Ministers were told that an Ipsos Mori survey had shown people remained dissatisfied with public services despite the billions of pounds Labour has spent on them. Ben Page, chairman of Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute, told ministers the public wanted to see nurses smile more and to “give the impression of caring”. Exactly what sort of smile they need is not clear.

Yesterday, health professionals were not amused. Alison Kitson, spokesman for the Royal College of Nursing, said: “I actually find this quite offensive. I’m sure every nurse in the NHS would find it offensive. It just shows that Whitehall is completely detached from the harsh reality of healthcare.” The Ipsos survey also showed the public wanted “flexible, responsive, customer-centred” services, with strong support (82%) for GP surgeries and council offices opening in the evening.

The presentation is likely to influence government policy, though it is unclear whether Tony Blair will have time to implement any new legislation as prime minister before he hands over power in the summer.

Sorry but you can get a survey to tell you anything. And if we see a push for GP surgeries to open in the evenings, to go with the 24 hr operating theatres that the NHS is to run, I will scream.

More on that survey methodology:

In our area the PCT has recently forked out an inordinate amount of money on something called ‘THE BIG HEALTH DEBATE’. Quite why it was called a debate I don’t know.
It consisted of a survey full of loaded questions (1: What would make accessing your GP easier? a)Surgery being open late into the evenings b) surgery being open on weekends c) the surgery never opening at all? Please tick one answer) which - remarkably produced the revelation that people want GP clinics to have longer opening times!

I think we have a few more important things to be worried about,

Such as the lack of NHS mental health services, highlighted by the plight of veterans of the Iraq adventure.

VETERANS from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering flashbacks, trauma and panic attacks are being told to wait 18 months or longer for treatment on the National Health Service.

Many of the ex-servicemen with post-traumatic stress should be given priority under government guidelines, but are being told that they must wait for treatment, in some cases for up to four years.

The Telegraph plugs away at the MTAS crisis:

You can tell that something has gone grievously wrong with a government, probably irreparably so, once the doctors get angry. In my experience, British doctors are naturally rather stoic, phlegmatic types. They are used to working horribly unsocial hours, eating dried-up, lukewarm NHS food and being abruptly confronted with patients in the direst of conditions. It takes quite a lot to get our doctors worked up, and now they are not just worked up but incandescent with fury.

This fiasco contains virtually all the elements that have contributed to the dismal failure of numerous Blairite policies: the urge for sweepingly radical gestures without intelligent planning for the aftermath, the failure to listen to experts in a given field and the naive enthusiasm for vast, unwieldy, centralised computer systems.

Britain is now littered with the wreckage of initiatives that were never properly thought through to start with, from House of Lords reform to the NHS patients’ database. If Mr Blair’s administration were a hospital surgeon it would have been struck off the GMC register long ago, because while it is tremendously eager to operate it has almost no idea of how to get things working efficiently again afterwards.

As does the Times:

It’s enough to make any doctor sick!
A new recruitment system has thrown the NHS into chaos, says Sarah-Kate Templeton.

NHS managers argue that doctors must realise they cannot all become consultants — the most highly paid of hospital staff — and that the health service also requires less qualified doctors to carry out more routine treatment.

I would like to meet that manager who has such a poor grasp of the service & is probably emblematic of the kind who are driving the NHS to ruin.

See this description of an interview from a trainee’s perspective.

The second station involved ‘Communication Skills’. It was awful. First, I had to fold a piece of paper according to verbal instructions. It did not make a crane - perhaps I did it wrong? Then I was given a random series of shapes on a piece of paper and had to describe them to another Consultant for her to draw them. Hmmph. Goodness only knows how I did on this station. I felt stupid and I know that I didn’t show how well I can actually communicate about real things. What I don’t understand is how this is supposed to supply them with reasonable doctors. If I did it all wrong, am I a bad Doctor? If I did it right, should you fast track me to a Consultant’s post?

Wouldn’t you be demoralised?

Those comments pages at the Telegraph keep growing & it is worth highlighting them again.

The one that started it all.
Who would be a junior doctor?
A petition to scrap the process.

And just for the heck of it, does this sound familiar to anyone, something about an IT project springs to mind.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 8:37 am and is filed under Management, NHS, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.