I rarely post anything political and this is out of fear for the NHS and care of patients and service users. Sadly this was inevitable. The Government is systematically stripping the NHS of its workforce under the guise of reducing corporate costs. That was clearly never going to be the case. The cost savings the public read about could never be made by reducing stationary budgets or removing 'unnecessary' corporate functions without forcing the day to day running onto clinical staff. Routinely wards are run by junior Band 5 staff as the Nurse in Charge, with senior staff forced in to non-clinical work to meet constant bureaucratic tasks. This will only increase with the removal of the corporate staffing. All NHS Trusts have been told to cut post pandemic corporate staffing by 50%. With a population still reeling from exacerbated poor mental health, and long term health conditions on the rise the NHS needs to be able to plan and prepare. The effects of the pandemic will be felt for decades and inevitably this catastrophic level of cuts will lead to clinical vacancies not being filled, services not being provided and increased waiting lists. NHS clinical and support staff are being downbanded with serious impact on pensions and living standards. These are not well paid staff at executive level, but the hardworking staff keeping the middle ground. If executive staff say jump they are the ones that say how high. They pick up the clinical staff when they wobble, they balance that with demands from corporate services when there are no corporate services to support them. Imagine a clinician having to provide care, plan how to manage a service on reduced staff and step in to gaps when patient care is a priority while chasing a service contract because there is no one else to do it. What is going to suffer? Imagine a team that for years has supported the trust to keep clinical care safe being stripped bare and no longer able to do their job. A job that allowed clinical staff to focus on the job in hand. Clinical staff leave and in order to save the millions of pounds each trust has be told to find, anywhere from £25 to £60 million each trust, clinical staff are not being replaced. When the money can't be found anywhere else we lose clinicians and as a result services will stop. That is the reality of these cut and run measures. But who am I? An Allied Health Professional who, after 26 years of work is deeply fearful at the uncertain future for the NHS. Daily we hear about 100s of jobs being lost from NHS trusts, and yes, almost certainly your local hospital will be included, some losing upto 800 posts. Now over 9,000 lower paid migrant jobs a year will be scrapped. Clearly the headline suggests a win to reduce imigration but that will impact hospital and social care on a massive scale. During the pandemic NHS staff burnt out in record numbers. They finally left and found work anywhere to redress a completely destroyed work-life balance. Carers in Social care left in droves as the hours in retail were better with better pay. Who took up the slack? A significant number of workers from abroad. We lose that workforce who will replace them?
Now once again the Government decided to announce the cutting of vital services that allow staff to share concerns in a safe space, to raise whistleblowings where they feel they aren't listened to by anyone else. Personally I have reached out to Freedom to Speak Up for advice and just to be heard. Now the Guardian Office that supports those teams is being abolished. We are sitting here allowing the NHS to be destroyed in front of us by 'people who apparently know better'! So please feel free to shout at the receptionist who can't book an appointment for you because there are more patients than staff to treat them. Yell at the ward or A&E staff who are already two hours past the end of a long and emotionally draining shift. Criticise the staff who are unable to support people at home because there are literally not enough hours in the day to see and spend time with every person they visit. Even better sit back and allow this Government to destroy your health opportunities and the teams who will fight for your health at the detirment of their own. But remember these are the staff you applauded once a week for saving lives at the risk of their own and now face unemployment, poor health or are trying to fight the NHS fire with a sieve of water but....hey, old news. This attempt at reform is too fast, too poorly thought out, with no joined up thinking and just a bid to grab media attention. I don't pretend to have the answers like some, but what I do know is the NHS as we know it, it unlikely to survive the next four years.