Staff shortages are now a national crisis

[Confusedofbritain]

Staff shortages across many sectors is now a national crisis surely? I’ve given up expecting anything of this government, but why isn’t Labour beating them with a stick over this?

Some examples which affect me personally….

• Can’t go on holiday due to cancelled flight, cause by lack of ground staff.
• I work for NHS trust and we have closed a ward due to c 50% vacancies. We have plenty of money but can’t spend it. Now competing with other trusts paying increasingly high golden handshakes.
• Tried to book restaurant for Tuesday birthday. Not possible as all places shut Monday and Tuesday due to short staff (esp chefs).
• Poor service when we do go out. Staff look frazzled.
• Can’t get a builder to do an extension. Often not bothering to quote. Builder friend can’t keep labourers and brickies. Paying increasingly high wages but getting poached.
• Window fitter quoted me 2x higher than 2019 (for a much smaller window!) probably because they’re so busy and can’t increase capacity due to lack of staff. So prices have gone up by 100%.
• Long delay in discharge for father from hospital, due to long waits for care package (caused by staff shortages). He was in hospital a lot longer than necessary and declined hugely as result.

It’s largely caused by Brexit, partly people retiring or changing livelihood during Covid…:.but why wasn’t this anticipated and what are we doing about it?

I want to see posters EVERYWHERE encouraging people to consider NHS careers. It’s a rewarding career, but impossible to cope and keep going with so few staff. We are escalating to NHS England constantly, saying we need a national solution. It’s beyond critical, but I’m not confident that there is a national drive to sort this out.

The economic and social consequences of ignoring this massive structural issue will be disastrous!

NHS is a doomed clusterf**k

Time to end that money pit and quango.

Chief execs on 6 digit salaries, and minimum wage at the bottom, run off the back of foreign workers.

Doesn’t matter how much you throw at it, it will swallow every penny and beg you for more.

I'm unsure which part you don't understand. ?

But my link is worth a look.
It's about a lot more than covid tho

Everyone has opinions , but everyone is talking about money & symptoms. I mean symptoms of society's problems.

The problems at root are simple

Greed
Wickedness ( evil )
Selfishness
Dishonrsty
Self righteousness
Lack of empathy
Lack of compassion

The solutions are not easy.

This is what happens when wicked : stupid people are put in charge...

Dentists, bus drivers in South Surrey, very long queues when ringing ANY company, yet people recovering from mild Covid or been in contact with individuals who have it, can surely WFH. Where have all the workers gone? How are they living? On fresh air?
We were given to understand that numbers had reduced so dramatically that no masks were needed, no booster shots, we can all go back to the office to work so what's the explanation for the lack of staff, or is Covid just a handy excuse for taking 43 minutes to answer the phone?
People need to buck their ideas up and get back to a cohesive way of working with others, not wfh, coffee breaks and dog walks plus a bit of TV and skiiving.

but we never stopped accepting immigrants did we?

Immigration is firmly on the Governments agenda. At no time was Brexit about being anti-immigration, letting the low level 'Wetherspoons' Brexit voters believe it was the core of the Brexit campaign was just part of the deception. The trade deal with India, as is stands will give up to 30 Million Indians the chance to work in the UK. Of course not that many will get work visas or want to come but it will be open to young Indians with a professional degree, eg medical, IT, Engineering, accounting etc, many of course will end up driving busses etc as this is exactly what happened in Australia. One I know arrived in Melbourne with a degree in Accounting and was snapped up by a large accounting firm to work as a low level accounts clerk with zero prospects of promotion so gave up and drove a bus 60 hours a week for more money.

The numbers let in will be flexible according to the wants (not needs) of employers.
UK employers and the Tory party in particular will never concede to having a high wage economy (apart from the inner circle of bankers etc) because as they see it, we have to compete with some pretty poor countries now we are out of the EU. Employers will never take full responsibility for training and development of their workers.
Where I live there are only a handful of min wage, zero hour, low level jobs available and in fact less than in the pre Brexit period from 2016. The only employers that will pay more are those who's potential employee have them over a barrel, ie those areas that Brexit has left a vacuum and even then if its a job that needs real training and experience, not waiting on tables or working in care homes etc.
The type of immigration the government wants is not like we had with the EU, ie a fair swap of people within the union but a one way street designed to undermine wage and conditions.

Where I live we have lost our NHS dentist surgery (Brexit, not COVID) Swimming pool and sports centre closed down for good (EU funding was in place for our part of the world for a new one but that's gone and the government has reneged on its agreement to equal EU project funding) We have zero GP appointments available, sometimes on the phone but mostly going via 111 or 999 (not enough doctors after Cameron decided several years ago that we didnt need so many NHS doctors. Also less nurses on account of trainee nurses now having to pay full university fees £9K++ per year for the last 3 years) and the local care home which has always be notorious for deliberate understaffing is in real trouble, often with only one person on a night when they should have a minimum of 4 thanks to the exodus of EU workers. And so it goes. Mostly Brexit, a bit of COVID (but EU are not suffering this is the same way). But tell people that 'this is what you voted for' and they wont believe you. IT is exactly what they voted for, it could not have been any different.

It doesn't help when social media platforms like tiktok are full of nurses and teachers telling a whole generation not to work in these Jobs because there so horrible and there so hard done by and they don't even have time to pee. It also doesn't help that with the cost of living many people are better of on benefits as they get government support to pay their bills and buy their food

But it's true. I refuse to lie.

Yes and and the money doesn't stop

Part of the problem is Brexit but the other part is the way staff are treated. Wages aren’t really they great compared to the responsibility and pressure expected of staff. We have lost lots of fantastic doctors and nurses because they have had enough of abuse and stress. You can’t ‘care’ properly because there’s too many patients

Thats the absolute truth of it. EU got the worst people in our country voting for the first time in their lives. A good percentage of the vote was based on racism, they being so stupid that they thought that by cutting us of off from the EU we would have less people from Africa and the Indian subcontinent for eg. Of course the paradox being, these places are now the prime countries for our government to coax immigrants from.

Why should people keep quiet about shit working conditions though?

Mrx I am very familiar with Together as I have contacts there. ( I no longer pay to be a member of anything though but props to them, I'm impressed with their energy etc). I'm still not sure what point you are making, sorry.

Bpdqueen
It doesn't help when social media platforms like tiktok are full of nurses and teachers telling a whole generation not to work in these Jobs because there so horrible and there so hard done by and they don't even have time to pee. It also doesn't help that with the cost of living many people are better of on benefits as they get government support to pay their bills and buy their food.

From my 26 years experience as a teacher l’d say they are speaking the truth. It needs bringing out into the open that key workers work in shit conditions.

Define “severely” disabled.

One problem is that employers have got used to a bottomless supply of healthy young EU workers and fight shy of employing anyone with issues. It’s very easy to ignore discrimination legislation at the point of hiring. The rates of disabled people (all types of disability) and other marginalised groups have dropped massively since the early nineties as a result.

I count myself forever lucky that I was in secure work and had achieved seniority before I became disabled. I was later able to downshift to something less intense in the third sector, but never had to leave employment. I was very fortunate on that count.

Wow what a completely unforeseen consequence of leaving the EU

We have people who can fill these vacancies, but some just don’t want to work. The system currently for getting job seekers is that claimants have to prove they are applying for jobs, or they get sanctioned. My brother is in hospitality and says it’s mad how many ‘applicants’ just don’t bother turning up for interviews. Presumably because they’ve ticked all the right boxes to get their job seekers money. When he’s reported this to the relevant government departments, they just don’t seem interested. We should make it a lot harder for people to choose unemployment as a lifestyle choice.

My comment is about social work. I had no idea other fields were the same.My industry is also experiencing national shortages. We are told it is because of less people entering the profession and therefore those who are in the job having heavier caseloads.
In reality it is simply because going locum pays twice as much per hour as permanent member of staff.
For others it is the realisation that there are professions that pay similar which are much less stressful.

A full time job for anyone is better than benefits. Employers dont like handing out either full time jobs or real living wages in many cases. The vast majority of unemployed people are not living it up on the dole, not at £70 per week or whatever it is. Another issue for say single parents is the cost of childcare, overpriced housing, either rent or mortgage, most expensive public transport in the world, eat up more than a single person could earn on minimum wage. The anomalies lie firmly with the government and employers. A friend of mine lives in Vienna, Austria, Pays around Euro 300 per year for a transport ticket (that price would be one month almost anywhere in the UK). Pays around Euro 600 per month for a near on city centre flat with rent control and all bills paid, eg heating, electricity and council tax (where would that happen in the UK) can see the doctor at any time he wishes, can get a dentist and very little cost, less than NHS dentistry but this is normal not a rare difficult to get service like in the UK and so on. Lives better on min wage full time job in Vienna that we could in the UK on 3 times the wage. This is the UK's problem. The money is here, its just in the wrong hands, ie the landed gentry, city bankers, land bankers who drip feed the market and all sorts of other spivs who live tax free with all their accounts done in the UK sponsored tax free havens of the world.

Re. The window cost. I live in the US and we had sone windows replaced last year and need more done this year. The price has jumped massively in six months, it’s really shocking. It’s inflation, IMO. April’s tested was 8.3

There are staff shortages in the EU as well. What have they left?

I worked in an NHS Trust before I took retirement because of total lack of leadership and support from management. This is because of the constant dumbing down of roles that require skill and experience, knowledge and training. I know several work colleagues who left for the same reasons. This is not the government. This is management that has lost the plot. There are too many layers of management imo and often they are ineffective and on large salaries. As for the other issues, I haven’t experienced problems. Over lockdown everyone seemed to want home improvements so the builders were and still are, busier than usual. Prices of building materials have increased everywhere, it’s not just a problem in the UK. The last few years have seen several different crises unravelling and any government would have found it challenging, it might be helpful to reflect on some of the helpful things that they have done rather than focus on the negative? It’s very easy to be an armchair critic and luckily we can vote them out when it is election time. In the meantime, we can make our views known to our respective MPs.

Forget about getting any genuine help at the Jobcentre. Worked there unhappiest time in my working life. In theory jobseekers get tailored support from trained work coaches. In practice work coaches have people booked in for 5 minute appointments throughout the day. How much help can anyone be given in 5 minutes each fortnight from a knackered work coach?
So glad to leave

I hate the way people mourn the loss of "cheap labour". We're talking real people being paid tuppence ha'ppeny to do work that the people in UK seemingly don't want to do because it's beneath them. They still have to feed, clothe and house themselves and their families, they are still human beings, it just so happens they're from EU countries, Why should they be treated like dirt, just because they're from another country,

We reap what we sew.

There will be a good percentage who are able to work but are work shy.

I think, among other factors such as Brexit, a hell of a lot of people have left the workforce because of the lockdowns.
Through the first 6 months of Covid, DH and I went into a deep financial lockdown incase we both got made redundant. I mean we literally didn't spend £1 on top of our minimal weekly food shop.
It showed us what I'd already suspected, that we can live perfectly adequately on about £18k between the two of us.
We don't have kids, but if we did, it would have shown us that I could be a stay at home mum.
I'm 6 months into a new role, so will do a further 18 months full time to get established, but then I'm absolutely dropping a day or two - WAY younger than I would have imagined.
I don't care about the pension consequences. I don't believe I'll see any of it anyway - I think the financial system will have completely collapsed by then.

Under UC, you can't be work shy or you get your benefits cut.
Long gone are the days of being on the dole being a lifestyle choice.

I am on UC, and although I am no longer required to look for work, when I first claimed I was given an example diary of what was expected if I was. There was no time to doss about at all.