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.

I don’t know the specifics of this post but in general the NHS is under, not over managed. We spend far less on the administration of healthcare than other western countries which get much better health outcomes, and it’s one of the reasons the NHS is so totally inefficient.

I haven’t read the thread, but let me guess, it’s a trumped up EDI roll for some clueless, doubtless middle class wokester to kneejerk react to Twitter storms about various trendy minorities, then be forced to retract a few days later when the adults finally enter the room. Am I right?

They're looking for an interpersonally talented and strategic bridge-builder 🙄

@ImJustMadAboutSaffron reply to the job vacancy with this. I 100% agree.

You can get four nurses for that. Off you go, lived experience

It’s basically a job for someone to take the continual flack management receive from the frontline workers when they complain about everything. I suppose customer services for staff to moan at. They need someone to be on the end of the phone for everyone else to yell at so the rest of management and non clinical don’t have to take so much time off due to the stress from being moaned at.
Basically when you have a moan the director of LE will counter your moan with his/her much worse LE so you will feel much better about your own situation.
After 35 yrs working in primary care I have seen and heard everything from the relentless stream of managers. They give themselves complex titles so you can’t work out who you need to speak to and just don’t bother. They spend most of their time in meetings where they defer most things to the next meeting. Eventually they get to the end of the financial year and realise they need to action everything and we are bombarded by endless paperwork to complete so they can justify their existence.
Over Covid we had to supply staff time sheets, you needed a degree in further maths to fill them in. I’m quite certain they all ended up in a virtual bin.
In cold weather they all work from home but ring round all the practices to make sure you are open. They are constantly looking for ways to penalise us. They are trying to enforce increase in hours and just don’t get it that you can’t extend working hours without cold hard cash. Very few have worked in real businesses so struggle with basic economics. If you double clinical hours you need to double staff wages. They rarely work after 4pm ( they may be at work but do not answer calls). I refused to use email since the individual we were communicating with twice breached confidentiality with some highly sensitive email threads for two separate practices.
As for lived experience they constantly reminded us of the two hours they spent in a practice during their induction.
Sorry, but if a rant but have a lifetime of lived experience of NHS managers and commissioners.

I think a few years ago during the first rounds of austerity many civil servants were forced to reapply for their jobs to show value.

If I were the Health Secretary I would be looking at doing that for the management of the NHS. Bloated and incompetent

It’s basically a job for someone to take the continual flack management receive from the frontline workers when they complain about everything. I suppose customer services for staff to moan at

Get someone with call-centre experience to do it for £30k then.

100000%

Doubt it. Most of the people in here seem to think "lived experience" is just a wankier, wokier way to say "experience" or "stuff that has happened to me", rather than a term which was introduced to stand in direct relation to clinical or professional experience.

Someone could say they have experience of/with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, outpatient services, inpatient services, etc., and not really know on a visceral level what those things might be like to go through from the patient perspective, because what they have is professional or clinical experience, which of course should be highly valued when designing and operating services. But if someone says they have lived experience of schizophrenia and psychiatric hospitals, they may well have some perspectives to share that are quite different, and it will be clear to the listener what kind of experience they have to share.

I think people hoped that creating the term "lived experience" to parallel "clinical/professional experience" would elevate the status of the former.

I think it's great that they are looking to highlight the importance of amplifying the voices of patients and addressing power imbalances in this way.
As other people have said, there are lots of high paying directors level roles on the NHS. Here's another one. But a really important one.
Really understanding experiences and care journeys of marginalised patients and then hopefully then put things in place to improve or shape services to better meet needs. Presumably embedding things like peer support etc across a range of services and treatments.
I think it is very progressive of them.

Haven't read the advert but am assuming this is what it is all about by the job to take. I really hope it goes to someone with real world experience of disability or adversity who has managed to also develop the relevant professional experience with a drive to lead improvement in this area.
I actually can't believe all the negative comments about this. Yes, we need frontline services, but frontline services need to be informed by the needs of patients, especially patients who have had negative experiences. That's the way to improve things.
I think this is - or should be of done properly - the opposite of a middle class woke EDI thing as someone unthread commented. So imagine if it was addiction services - wouldn't you want people who have accessed and hopefully successfully through a recovery journey, with lots of networks of other people with addiction issues and in varying stages of recovery or not - aren't those exactly the right people to talk to about improving addiction services? Surely this is what is meant - that, across the whole range of trust activity, presumably with a great deal of innovation required - and so a director level post seems appropriate.

And people wonder why NHS is on its knees. All woke roles should be axed and money spent on front line services. This is why just throwing more money at NHS is pointless until they get rid of top level wokeness.

It's a role to support the growing number of people with mental health problems. Filled by people who have suffered mental health problems

It’s not a non job. Lived experience and co-production is the future for MH services including services like recovery colleges which I have had the pleasure of working within. MH services are hugely failing and it needs a massive overhaul.

It reads like a spoof ad.

I doubt either of you understand what the role entails

Fuck that is a top word salad. What does it mean? - is it someone who can drive better care for patients with diverse needs? I don’t know about the role, but the twat who wrote the ad should be fired.

It does sound complex and that’s because it is. I had to write a 3000 word essay on what “recovery” means in MH. Also this candidate must have been treated in secondary care so they would have substantial experience of also being a director AND a service user. They need to direct the power balance between statutory and voluntary MH services which believe me is NO mean feat.

Andddd the trans thing comes up again! Mumsnet bingo 🙄

Agree

If there is no money to implement the recommendations (which there won't be), it's just pissing cash up the wall.

@Clymene

Not necessarily. A large part of the role is integrating the voluntary sector with public sector in a partnership. Obviously voluntary sector relies on its own funding but it can piss off public sector workers if they feel charity bods are stepping on their toes. SO much power within MH stat services.

As others have said ‘Lived Experience’ is a recognized term and role within mental health trusts and genuinely incredibly valuable for a marginalized group. It is vital that the people using mental health services are at the heart of decisions about what Trusts do and services they provide at the highest levels.

Having said that, the advert is twaddle and I don’t understand what they actually want or what the successful applicant will be doing and whether it justifies the massive pay.

It is jobs like this that we’re part of the reason I left my public sector role.

The aim of the NHS is to be the best at delivering patient care. This needs focus on the basics - doctors, nurses, managing appointments so that missed appointments are minimised, getting patients out when they no longer need to be in hospital. If the focus was on the basics, improvements for everyone - including marginalised groups - would follow.

Instead, these initiatives will consume a lot of staff time that is not spent on patient care. Service will get worse, leading to more emphasis on D&I and HR initiatives.

In my previous role at a specialised government agency, our new CEO was a former civil service diversity champion. Suddenly, all our senior management meetings were about D&I. We ceased to discuss the role we were actually set up to do (technical regulation) and instead each weekly meeting had staff sharing their ‘lived experience’ of racism, sexual diversity, trans, going to a comprehensive, not having a degree etc

All very lovely, but in the meantime we did F All about the problems in our sector which was the whole point of our regulation existing.

Particularly frustrating when they get paid more than actual professionals who studied for many years @Flammkuchen

Like I say though, I saw these jobs be swept away pretty swiftly in our last round of cost savings at work so hopefully the NHS will follow suit