Hi,
I am a band 7 with 27 years in the NHS but most of these were spent in a different profession so I have been finding my feet over the last couple of years in my new role.
The role is very demanding with a massive workload (unmanageable tbh) and I struggle with doing everything. Not because I don’t know how to do it, but because there is way too much of it. A lot of it is daft paperwork that wouldn’t exist if they had better IT. As a result, I will admit that I don’t really enjoy the job as much as my old profession and am looking elsewhere to get back.
Meanwhile, we had a band 5 start with us about a year ago. She is a mature starter to the NHS and did a degree (BSc and MSc) after raising children. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that. However, she is ambitious to a point she is subtly trying to dislodge me from my role. I have started to notice what she is doing. She is taking advantage of the fact I am busy and taking on things for my manager (and his manager) and almost ‘showing off’ to them. She has also started undermining me in front of my managers. She has been taken out of her area (as other staff are saying she doesn’t get on with them) and she is being given tasks to do by my manager - one of which is something I should be doing (but struggle to due to demands elsewhere). Fine you might say but she has started asking me things like ‘are you looking for another job’, ‘when are you leaving’ and has emailed my manager to put something in place that she has done instead of me. She has only been in the NHS a year! She is very clever, and very capable but I’m starting to see evidence of what she is doing to make me want to leave. I won’t lie, I don’t want to stay but this is making me worse.
I have my appraisal coming up. Do I mention it?