NHS employee- workload doubled overnight

[Hurryupretirement]

I am posting this as I think it’s important that people know how the government is ‘tackling’ NHS waiting lists.

I am an NHS nurse with 28 years experience. I work in a specialized area which assesses people for a specific, life limiting condition. The assessment process is long and detailed.

We, like most of the NHS, have a waiting list ( we lost 9 months over covid and haven’t been able to recover).

With no notice whatsoever we were told that we would need to see double the number of patients. We had to make it work. Non negotiable.

Myself and my colleagues are now working evenings and weekends just to stay afloat.

This is the NHS’s ‘plan’ for tackling waiting lists.

You said you were working evenings and weekends, now you say no extra hours.
And you say you're now doing home visits instead of clinics - but home visits take much longer so that would mean you see fewer people.

Can you try to explain more clearly what is actually happening?

Waiting lists are a major issue, it's not wrong that the NHS is focusing on that. If you have specific concerns you must speak to your union and prioritise your own health.

Me too - 28 years of community nursing. We cover virtual and rapid and I feel like I am going to have a heart attack most days with stress. People say leave, but to go where?? Where else in nursing is any better?

There are only so many hours in one day. They are crap examples as you have said, these are assessments into an illness not a bloody hair appointment.

That’s shocking but not surprising. I’m NHS too, but not in the nursing field. I started a role 6 months ago which has two job titles in one and it is very clearly the work of 2 - as I am now finding. I’m not sleeping well and getting very stressed due the workload. With 25+ years in the NHS, I am considering leaving for the first time. The extra work on NHS staff has been piling up for a few years now and the general public don’t realise. It’s not safe and I think it’s shocking that the NHS doesn’t look after the health and wellbeing of its own staff. My role is a new one and not once has my manager assessed my workload or asked if I’m ok.

Even if you are being paid, the price that will be paid is your health. Are people saying you were at half capacity before? Think not. I am sure there might have been a way to make improvements, but saying something needs to be done without infrastructure is ridiculous.. If a certain amount of time is needed per patient and this time has been slashed the clearly standards will drop. Go to.your union

It's not the government's fault, it's your employer's.

But I agree that no-one should be exected to double their workload when they are already overstretched.

Thats horrendous, yourself and your colleagues could burn yourselves out.

They need to employ more staff first before increasing your workload. Its like filling a hole in a sinking ship with toilet roll, and wondering why its on the sea bed.

The problem is that you (quite understandably) don't want to offer a worst service and KNOW that some people are not going to get the help you need and ARE going to get a wrong diagnosis.

But that's not up to you.

The nhs has decided that it will put up with a worse service and has accepted the statistic that people will die/get ill/get a worse service in order to see more people.

It's SHIT (and I disagree with it) but that's the current choice.

You now have to learn to work within this shit system by cutting the number of questions, not asking follow up questions, reminding clients that the appointment is only 30 minutes, stopping looking after their emotional wellbeing, being much more brusque/focused/pointed, cancelling if they turn up late.

I suggest for YOUR mental wellbeing you decide what questions you can lose and write on the form not asked as appt 30 minutes.

You're going to need one of those incredibly thick skins

They need to employ more staff, I know we all know there is a staffing crisis in the NHS.

Doubling your workload could result in you and your colleagues burning out. Its like plugging a hole in a sinking ship with toilet roll and wondering why its on the sea bed.

The extra hours are hours we are all doing unpaid from home- a large part of our role is in writing assessment reports. Wexall have the facility to work remotely. We are doing this so that we can still spend a reasonable amount if time with each patient .
in terms of home visits- we get allocated home visits which obviously take longer as we ‘lose’ admin time driving between patients, Management know this but won’t reduce the number of people seen to account for this but as the admin aspect of the role still needs doing we again end up ‘catching up’ in our own time.

Your managers are massively taking the piss and even though it'll be tough you need to proactively sort this. Are any of your seniors backing you up?

Do the freedom to speak up procedure and I'd also request a meeting with the director of nursing/ chief nurse (whatever they're called in your trust).

We've had to do this recently, not with volume of work but putting us in unsafe situations- they did listen in the end.

It sounds horrible and I think the general public do realise and was part of the reason they voted for Labour in such numbers.

I agree w PP on contacting the union and management.

In the meantime, are there any process changes you could make to speed up eg. the report writing aspect? Can you get together with your colleagues and share ideas? If there are unfillable clinical vacancies can you lobby for additional admin support where you dictate core points in the report and it's written by someone else?

Same here op.And if you are a hard worker they reward you with more work regardless of how many hours you have in a week.For these saying get another job it's pretty hard when all you have ever done is nursing and love it.I doubt there is another nursing job which isn't just the same.

I have to in the sense that for any employed person if you turn up and refuse to do half the work allocated you will be disciplined and eventually sacked. Plus none of us will turn away patients booked to see us.
This is coming from senior management and the board of directors are fully aware.

OP, I've been there. I tried to make it work. I don't recommend trying that path.

The job you loved is gone. If your senior management is determined to take this path, the good you did in this job is no longer possible.

Start looking for work elsewhere. Think about your exit strategy. It's likely that you can't salvage this.

In the meantime, you can try to fight this. These changes are a huge threat to patient safety. Stop trying to keep senior management happy. Yes, they can manage you out eventually, but this takes time, and you won't be the only one who feels the way you do. You can't stay anyway, because staying will break you.