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Interesting that you too left the “sinking ship”. Wonder why that was and what made you come to that conclusion?

I know that when I trained as a nurse back in the 1980′s, the PEH was THE place to be, but then we had good ward sisters, a good matron, good doctors and a good board of health to be proud of.

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Which reflects the job to be done and the skills of the staff available. It should be the basis of how that organisation is managed. Which appears noticeable by its absence in recent events. HSSD being a prime example.

I have worked professionally in the UK, Spain, France, Holland, Germany, and the USA, and was often recruited to define better working standards and practices and train staff to use them. And the only real problems I encountered were those of language.

My experience is that good staff react well to being taught to do things properly, and they often taught me things as well. The learning process is continuous.

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One of the biggest issues was the “Agenda for Change” that was visited upon our local health service and staff. It changed at a stroke the pay scales of our nurses and auxiliaries many of the auxiliaries received a reduction in their pay and a change to bog standard NHS working conditions. This was a prime example of a piece of NHS practice cut a pasted into our Health service with little or no consultation with local staff and which led to lots of local people who had worked for the Board of Health, leaving after many years service.

One of the arguments used was that it was needed so there would be a smoother transition from staff recruited in the UK into our health system. The Banding system of nurses was well understood. It was complete and utter rot in my view, as many of our nurses were recruited from Scandinavia, The Philippines, Portugal, India and other places completely outside the NHS. It was just that the mangers who wanted it came from the NHS by and large.

We also have lots of posts now that we happily lived without for decades, from infection control specialist nurses to pain control nurses. We have them because we are told it is NHS best practice.

When l when I was in our Hospital back in the 90’s and before, infection control was monitored by Matrons and Ward sisters who patrolled the wards looking for potential sauces of infection and eradicating them as soon as the showed up.

Well trained nurses looked after individual patient infection by regular changing of dressings and again close monitoring of wounds. Now of course I am not saying that does not happen today but we didn’t need a dedicated person dealing with it.

The same with pain control. My pain control regime was dictated to the senior ward sister by my surgeon, who in turn made sure her nurses followed the regime to manage any pain I might experience but again we didn’t need a dedicated specialist to this task.

All these dedicated positions are all very and they are great people of that I have no doubt, but they do cost a lot of money and it may be that is what happens in the NHS but it doesn’t mean with a much smaller health budget, that we have to mirror these practices here.
I don’t recall not having them in the past, resulting in huge problems in the hospital and I have spoken to several nurses who worked there in those days and they agree.

There are others but I will leave it there, if you want to know more talk to staff they will tell you of the dedicated NHS doctrine they are forced to follow on a daily basis.

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Whilst writing, can someone please explain to me why De Sausmarez is constantly being described as a ward which has been closed because of staffing issues? De Sausmarez had a full contingent of staff – it is the medical wards that have the issues.

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I don’t have any “inside knowledge” at all. All the information I glean is from talking to people and, re the pension scheme, from studying the scheme info which is all online and from my 30 years of running financial services businesses. There are lots of subjects that I know zilch about and so you won’t see me commenting on those, unlike Spartacus who willingly exposes her ignorance, but on issues like management, tax and pensions I will put myself up alongside anybody locally (with one or two exceptions).

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Absolutely not! I’m an owner of my own company, I work 80 hours a week and so I a, able to spend whatever time I like doing what I want (within reason). I couldn’t afford to waste 4 years or more of my peak earning years on politics, having invested 30 years of my life to get where I am now. In 10 years time my circumstances might be right, but I’ve got zero interest in being part of a body of which I cannot directly exert control or make change, and I just know that I’d never last 6 months at it.

Spartacus

I have never sat on any States Committee of any sort. The closest I have got to that was sitting on a couple of informal working groups about 10 years ago.

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