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.

There's something worryingly discriminatory about the need to have a health condition for this role.

The requirement for competence in the media is telling, what has the Trust done that requires someone in post and ready to manage the fallout?

When I trained 1986-1989 there were ward managers day and night. Senior sisters, junior sisters. Staff nurses and students. Obviously Consultants, Drs and trainees. A secretary for each ward and domestics. How many new titles are we paying huge salaries to who are doing fuck all? Millions of pounds wasted. That's all.

And to add to the donations to Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence etc.

It is notable that the police force which has gone back to basics on focusing on crime (i.e. why the police exist) is doing much better than those which focus on managing their social media profile.

Have you seen the Xmas decorations in some of our local hospitals?? St Caths Birkenhead... All brand new and must have cost thousands of pounds.

@Xomega - very good point and a shrewd observation.

This would be the same trust subject to a public inquiry ten years ago for poor care, and leaving patients in their own urine, with hundreds of deaths in excess of what would have been expected.

Because a lot of HR depts now do Employee Experience. (Came from Customer Experience.) So maybe Lived Experience is the next step?

Does anybody defending this think this role, at that salary, is going to your average patient who has struggled to get adequate care for a lifelong condition?

I absolutely think outcomes can be improved by listening to lived experience. This is not going to be it though.

I'm willing to bet that they aren't looking for a dumpy, greyhaired female whose disabilities aren't particularly photogenic and has had less than stellar treatment from health professionals either as a patient or, even more so, as an NHS employee on the basis of her sex, gender, age, disabilities and class.

This

Absolute joke. How can they allow nurses to strike when this sort of nonsense is going on up top.
That salary is utterly ridiculous. Utterly utterly ridiculous and as pp have pointed out sounds like they've earmarked someone already which makes the paying of marketing the role even more sickening because doesn't sound like the general public have a chance in hell of getting it anyway.
20 years ago my friend moved out of working as a paramedic because the new manager mucked up the way everything was done and they couldn't take the stupidity of it all. They ended up becoming a private carer through an agency on a lot more money. 20 years ago and it seems things are even worse now. Such great disparity in the wages as well.
What is happening in this country?!

So do all midwives need to be mothers? All oncologists be cancer survivors. To suggest you have to have 'lived' the experience is a terrible insult to those who strive to care for their patients with empathy and compassion. And have studied for years to be experts in their fields.

I don’t work in the NHS but was intrigued. The advert is written in quite an annoying way but people are cheery-picking the guff and ignoring the bits in the person spec that does elevate the post to a more senior post. Quite clearly not everyone is going to have experience of the below so it is bollocks to say anyone could do it. Like a few others have said, it’s potentially quite progressive to be actively looking for someone senior who has significant health issues.

*Experience of working at or near Board level within a complex organisation and advising on highly complex matters
*Track record in delivering and implementing strategic developments within the NHS or across a complex business
*Experience of capacity planning and translating organisation strategy and vision into operational objectives

@comical2023 no of course not. But I would be fairly suspicious of say a women's hospital that didn't have any mothers working for it in a senior role!

There are approximately 1.2 million people currently employed by the NHS most of whom will be only too happy to share their lived experience to help improve services. Many will have been services users themselves and can comment on where they see the problems in their working lives.

1.2 million people is going to provide the diversity of lived experience that a single post holder cannot.

TL:DR the NHS already has a wealth of lived experience resources, managers might consider listening.

Having experience of the NHS, what this means is that there's a white middleclass male NHS executive who left his last role after a string of disasters including in no particular order;

Pissed in the office
Sexually harassing junior admin
Ex wife with a restraining order
No access to his children on safeguarding grounds
Inappropriate use of NHS information systems to obtain personal information

but his mates think he's just been so badly treated by all those bad womens in his life and needs a bit of a hand to get back on his feet.

They are a director.
That doesn't mean they are doing all of the activity themselves.
That means they are developing and implementing a vision, a whole bunch of objectives and tasks, leading a team of people to deliver all of this. In this case probably quite a lot of peer support, health care assistants, volunteers and so on. In addition to working with therapists, clinicians, mental health nurses, to gather views and implement service improvements.
It's not just the one massively overpaid person doing some stuff on their own.

This money could be better spent on frontline mental health nurses.

And the kind of mental health support they get will be the kind of mental health support that's always been available- years of a wait, not joined up with all of the other services required, and a specific therapy available for a short period of time, then off you go again, patients to deal with all of your complex, overlapping issues on your own again.

Delivered by a service feeling impotent in the face of the need in front of them and not understanding why they aren't helping (as well as the lack of capacity, poor conditions etc). And not getting the job satisfaction they could get as a result.

It is not just about more frontline services. Yes, lots of it is absolutely about having enough staff, paying people well, attracting people, having the right terms and conditions and all of that. But some of it, just a bit of it, is about making the services more targeted to the needs of the patients. And patients are best placed to tell you what they need. And they are not a homogeneous mass. And so you need to embed their voices and views and experiences - good and bad - in everything that is being done. Things shift and evolve, and current services, in relation to mental health and addiction in particular, do not always 'work'. There is massive scope for improvement and change and adding extra front line staff will help, but that's not the only thing that will improve things.

No fucking way is that post going to someone who is disabled.

What would ‘unlived experience’ be? Experiences you had while dead?!

Well I don’t understand the role so don’t know if this paragon is worth paying over £100k of desperately needed funds by a taxpayer-funded service that’s completely broken, but I do know that whoever wrote that jargon nonsense should be fired.

That post would pay for 4 front line workers. The front workers would then have time to talk to patients and ask them what kind of service they need. It is so basic yet the whole NHS has become a jobs for the boys or white middle class girls situation.

And employing people at a leadership level who have direct experience of being overcoming health/ social care/ addiction adversities whilst also being a director level professional, who works with networks of people who are bringing their own expertise by experience to bear, is the exact opposite of carrying on with this so called middle class elitism.

Let's think again about mental health services. Yes we have lots of CPNs. And no doubt we need many more. We also have ranks of extremely middle class clinical psychologists with a fairly narrow set of life experiences.

Some see the high salary and think 'oh yes, another overpaid person removed from the front line'. I see the potential - and yes it is only potential until the right appointment is made and starts to see results - to finally be properly valuing expertise by experience (as well as professional expertise, you don't get director level salary without that). No one knows the complexity of the issues, and the frustrations, and biases and the disempowerment , like those who have the need for and experiences of the services.

Plenty of money for roles like this. But not for basic patient care. Sad

I think if we did an analysis, we would see that the balance of funding is very much in favour of basic patient care. As it should be. But in a multi billion pound service, some money gets spent on other things.