Director of Lived Experience role at NHS on £115K

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

www.healthjobsuk.com/job/UK/Staffordshire/Stafford/Midlands_Partnership_NHS_Foundation_Trust/Director/Director-v4828381

What the absolute hell? Words fail me.

We all have a 'lived experience' but what 'lived experience' are they looking for..... Trans/black/gay/?/white/homeless/doctor role/patient role/ what exactly for that waffling descriptor and huge salary

@pursuedbyablackdog for Health Minister 👍🏻👍🏻

Yes. I'd rather have 2-3 qualified nurses than someone devoted to blarney.

I think it’s about men who don’t think they are.

What - you don't think that people who actually experience serious illness and get treated by the NHS should have a significant voice at the Board?

I think we probably need more of this, not less.

It might be a valid role but is it really worth nearly 4 x the average salary of a nurse?

" Ensure brave spaces for people who use our services to feel they can have feedback to the
organisation."

You can pay people big salaries to have good ideas but it will be utterly pointless unless there's an adequate workforce to implement their good ideas.

People need to pay attention to the context.

It's a trust that provides a lot of mental health related services. "Lived experience" is a term already in VERY wide use in that sector to refer to the experiences and voices of people who know what it's like to be seriously mentally ill (and to get treated like shit a lot of the time by services), and more specifically, to describe roles in the service for who have those experiences and use them as part of their job working in the sector.

If an organisation advertises for a role using a particular phrase that might be ambiguous to the general public but means something specific to people who work in that type of organisation, then that's probably what they're using it to mean.

As the Trust provides other services outside mental health, perhaps the director will be expected to incorporate the perspective of people with lived experience of the other types of problem they deal with, too — it's not that clear (which isn't great, no — the ad could be better-written).

For fuck's sake. I had to see this all over GC Twitter yesterday/day before yesterday, now it's here too.

You're playing into the TRA agenda of trying to make it look like gender critical feminists are just bigoted kneejerking Daily Mail readers in disguise, if you jump on anything that looks vaguely like it's trying to improve things for minorities and complain it's probably about giving special things to trans people.

This is about trying to start involving people in their own care. The kind of people who have been coerced and abused and had their feelings and opinions disregarded by the people who were supposed to help them for hundreds of years.

@pursuedbyablackdog great post. @lipstickwoman are you my MIL she's a retired Senior nurse and she echoes everything you say!

Hahahahahaha! As if. Opinions like this, are why the NHS are on their knees

I was just coming here to say this! If you can make sense of the bullshit it’s actually a very valuable role, it will facilitate change across the sector long term, but that salary?!? No chance!

We've just had a restructure at work and they got rid of all the roles that were just meaningless fluff. And the same amount of work, if not more, is getting done

I'd rather they just paid for more nurses. My "lived experience" is that what actually matters is enough well paid well treated medical staff

Wonder what their budget is...... and what the local internal politics are.....it'll make all the difference to the success of the role.

I would think a lot of people will be watching with interest.

I currently have a relative in hospital, very frail.

Laxatives given. In view of frailty instructed to ring the bell to be taken to the toilet when need arises. Bell left out of reach.

Ward rings to the sound of unanswered bells from those who can reach them.

This is a snapshot of lived experience from last week.

Will these problems be solved by having someone sitting inputting data in an office on a a six figure salary? Or how about a bit of common sense and compassion and the extra nurses that that salary could cover?

It seems like a nonsense role but reading the posts on here I can see it's needed.

For those saying it could pay for X number of clinical staff and the NHS should do away with senior management who do you think should do the strategy and policy work?

Any fool could bullshit their way through that job spec. I'm tempted to apply myself!

"who do you think should do the strategy and policy work?"

Maybe fewer strategies and policies and more compassion and common sense from the people 'at the chalk face', using the salaries that would have paid for endless new strategies and policies to pay for enough staff to have time to apply their compassion and common sense.

Yes this.

Actually it’s a hugely important role. It’s about building services which are developed by people who have actually got experience of what they’re doing. They want to build mental health services based on what people who have experienced mental health (for example) challenges to actually make services work rather than what they think might work. People who understand in practice what’s needed not just full of theory

Couldn't they have 2 non-execs at board level and then a couple more therapists or nurses for the money? If the role is to have the voices of patients heard at a senior level wouldn't that achieve the same end and get some more staff on the ground

Absolutely correct. The NHS is NOT underfunded. It is badly run, dysfunctional, broken & failing. There is an obvious need for fundamental structural reforms, but no politicians of any party are brave enough to admit this, never mind actually doing anything about it. Wes Streeting is hinting at saying the unsayable, but we will see if this translates into actual reform.

We should be looking at the mixed public / private healthcare systems with universal insurance provision & competing providers in countries like Israel & Germany and learning from them.

applauds