General Chat

I think they should set up a sort of think tank with people like you and I and other like minded people - I am quite sure we could come up with some excellent money saving ideas and it wouldn't cost them a fortune for the advice - I'd be happy to do it for nothing - after all we're the people who use the services and we all have experience of the service in one way or another, either as an employee or as a user of the service

one thing that really angered me was the constant updating of the headed paper - every time the name of the trust was changed new paper was commissioned - this happened on at least four occasions - good quality A4 paper turned into scrap - well not by me - I never used the new paper till the old had gone - on one occasion I completely missed one set of paper - the third one came out just as I finished the first!! no one ever noticed but I just could not bring myself to discard such good quality paper

That is why I am so mad that my local trust is now scrapping all the present uniform and replacing it with scrubs style uniform - and no doubt there have been several lots of new headed paper since I left

as long as it has the correct address and telephone number on it who cares about the name!!!

well having been an NHS clerical worker for nearly thirty years I have to step in to defend them!!

Initially I worked in a psychiatric social work department where I typed up all the notes of the social workers - a stack of them, and did all the correspondence, dealt with the telephone calls and patients who visited the departmnt

I moved on to the central nursing office where I was in charge of all the personnel data for the area - this meant maintaining the personnel files, placed the ads for new staff, sent out the interview letters, set up the interviews and did the UKCC checks. At the same time I worked for the Director of Nursing Services.

The hospital then went Trust and an HR [hate the term] department took over without notice - a department with around ten people all doing what I was doing on my own

They then disbanded the central nursing office so the right hand no longer knew what the left hand was doing with regard to staffing of the wards!! chaos ensued

I then moved on to be secretary to a clinical nurse specialist on a Neuropsychiatry Ward also doing medical secretary work for the professor, the doctors and registrars along with working for my own boss. I also was in charge of the running of the office. I worked jolly hard but enjoyed every moment of it

Now I agree there can be administrative cost cutting and I know for a fact that if I went back to the hospital - after having been retired for ten years - I could put the finger on dozens of administrative staff who could be shelved and not missed one iota

So the upshot is that a hospital does need clerical staff and they do work hard but there is plenty of room for cuts in that area

DET

I can hear the howls from the Unions !!

Thenperhaps there should be an expectation that all hospitals follow suit....possibly where practical, rolling it out to Health Care centres.

Our local hospital does use a few, but not nearly as many as a comparible sized US hospital. The one I have knowledge of, has **3000***!!!! volunteers and has had to close their books!!!

Some of the jobs the US volunteers do...
Escort on discharge
Restock ward supplies
Ferry files around the hospital
Take samples to the on site labs
Reception desk duties
Serve food on the ward/water jugs etc
Assist feeding patients
Enter up inflow/output charts

In some cases it avoids the unecessary employment of non specialist staff, in other's it enables trained staff to concentrate in the actual medical patient care

Sorry I disagree about loosing the admin staff. Getting the right admin staff now thats another thing. I spent the first four years of my clerical career learning all basics in various aspect of office procedures from accounts, stats, bad debts, costing etc. Nowadays if someone can pick up a phone or log on.....well that means they are an office worker.When moving into the Health dept many years ago, being fully aware of how much everything cost, whether that was equipment, wages,overtime, uniforms etc the actual cost could be found immediately, without any computer.Within my own area in the Metropolitan shakeup of 1974 all this individual information was thrown out of the window because there was this 'big purse' and there wasn't any reason to analyse any parochial cost.Stats didn't matter.The overall change was so expansive that no one person could have the knowledge.The responsibility - yes- and paid accordingly and that is where the money goes on fat cat salaries.Going back to admin staff, their mistakes result in missed appointment, wrong adresses, wrong patients booked and reducing the staffing only causes more mistakes.-JLe

at the hospital where I worked there is massive input from volunteers - both from overseas and locally - they are invaluable

Put a moritorium(?) on Trusts merging or splitting. The cost involved includes consulting ALL staff by letter, and there never seems to be admin redundancies.

Cut down on admin staff. If someone has been taken on as a temp consultant, then you don't then find another project for them so as to keep them on the books when the 1st one is completed.

Make more use of volunteers, particuarly amongst the unemployed/school leavers. Some volunteers could take over admin jobs when they become vacant through natural wastage. Others could help in a non medical capacity on the wards alongside HCA. It works in the US, so why not here?

common sense counts for nothing these days - the pc brigade, health and safety and the rest of it has taken over and unfortunately we seem to have let it

any more ideas on how to save money in the NHS then?

I think in the past there was more common sense and a sense of if something needs doing then you just get on with it. Not just in the nursing profession but in all walks of life

We didn't know of job descriptions - if something needed cleaning we did it!
Liz

My mother was recently in hospital my first visit was in the evening and her table was not as clean as it should have been but as it was evening I assumed it would be cleaned. Next day I went in the afternoon, the table had not been touched. That evening I went in armed with dettol spray and cloths and cleaned all around her bed and table. If was filthy especially under the table and the legs.

Next day when I visited, mum said the cleaner was more particular cleaning around her bed. There is no excuse for dirty hospitals.

In the past the nurse would have cleaned the blood off the floor as well as the patients but nowadays it's not part of their job description so it is not done.

I'm definitely against nursing staff paying for their uniforms.
With regard to Janey's situation which I can readily believe. I have worked within a hospital from time to time over a period of forty years and I would say that the beginning of the 1990's the standards started slipping with regards to the cleaning staff. The result was the increase of MRSA. This didn't happen over night but as a result of every conceivable short cut in cleanliness . My own office used to be vacced every evening. It was then reduced to once a week. The rest of the hospital suffered in the same way. Nowadays things have changed.There is antiseptic hand wash everywhere and I have visited several times in the last month , the wards are certainly cleaner than the last time I was an inpatient about ten years ago.As for being an inpatient when paying on a travel insurance, this possibly wouldn't happen as this is normally the domain of the private hospital, a patient would be transferred from an N.H.S. hospital after the initial treatment then transferred by ambulance and would be charged for the transport. -JLe

Just a word from a foreigner.

My mum was treated at an NHS hospital in 1994. (As an aside, that was the lowest point in your NHS, and we were kind of appalled at what we saw -- things like blood on the waiting room floor and on the reception desk, not cleaned up over several hours, and no ice available to put on the large lump on my mother's head for the 5-hour wait late at night, although the doctor we finally saw advised her to go home and put ice on it.)

We had travel insurance. (We don't leave home without it, here. The big reason is that the bulk of Canadian travel is to the US, and our own universal public plan would only cover a fraction of what a US hospital would bill for a service. Many people pay credit card fees that provide out-of-country insurance automatically. The amounts that US hospitals charge are triple or more what a hospital here or in the UK charges for services, because the US health/insurance system is based on money grubbing.)

After the doctor finished her examination, we asked how to arrange for the payment. She waved us off. The cost to the hospital of the whole process of billing the insurance company for the small amount of money the services cost would be far more than it was worth.

However, if my mum had been hospitalized, the insurance we had would have paid the NHS bill.

I'm sure there are non-residents treated in hospitals in the UK who don't have insurance, just as there are in Canada. Obviously people can't travel here for heart transplants and expect to get them for free. But our hospitals don't turn accident victims away from emergency rooms for lack of resident status and insurance; they treat them, admit them if necessary, they bill them, and swallow the loss.

I don't think I'd want them doing anything different.

You have said it all Anne. The one place where nurses change on arriving/leaving at hospital is the ICU unit. They all wore scrubs - at least they did in the hospital I was in last year.

too many chiefs and not enough Indians!!!

I don,t think Nurses should pay for their uniforms,but I think that Overseas Health Tourists should be made to pay for their treatment.as we have to when abroad.Also, it would be cheaper to employ more nursing staff direct rather that paying excessive costs to Agencys who supply lots of them all around the country.also get rid of the Highly Paid top heavy management.**M**.

I don't agree that nurses should have to provide their own uniforms or that overseas visitors should have to pay for their treatment cos that's a dodgy old road to start going down. If the NHS wants to start saving cash, they should start cutting some of the wages of management and consultants and a few more.

It is cost cutting that meant that nurses have to wear uniforms going home. They saved on laundry fees, and space.

In A&E I agree it would be impossible as they are rushed of their feet but they should not leave the department in their uniforms as the likelihood of cross infection is greater from working in a hospital than a visitor to the hospital.

District nurses should wear disposable gloves and aprons which should be disposed of in a plastic bag and placed into a clinical waste bag. Obviously this depends on the procedure being carried out. When my son was receiving intraveneous drugs his nurse was gloved and wore a disposable apron which she bagged and took away with her. She also took all sharps with her.

It is impossible to eradicate all germs coming into a hospital but that does not mean that measures should not be put in place to minimise their spread. Cleaning is obviosly paramount