I’ve been working as a bank member of staff in an NHS admin role for the past few months. There seems to be a power struggle between the manager and various other team members, some of whom are senior and some of whom aren’t. I don’t know the history well enough to say who is right, but everybody appears to be pulling in different directions.
This isn’t simply people having slightly different working styles or occasionally adapting a process. People are following completely different processes and pathways, and some seem to be going entirely off-piste and doing whatever they think is right. Depending on who I ask, I receive a completely different answer.
As bank staff, I genuinely don’t know whose instructions I’m supposed to follow. I feel as though I’m contributing to the mess despite trying hard to do everything correctly. Whichever direction I take, somebody will apparently think it’s wrong.
There is already a huge backlog, with some of the work going back nearly six months. The conflicting processes are also causing problems when work is passed to external teams, because information is being handled or sent in different ways and nothing ever seems to go smoothly.
We work in quite a crucial area. I won’t say exactly what the role is, but patients need to feel that their voices are being heard, and when things go wrong their frustration can understandably escalate!
Emotions are naturally high, but that makes the lack of consistency even more concerning. Ultimately, it is the patients who feel the impact.
It feels as though people are rebelling against one another rather than working together under one agreed process. I find it genuinely disturbing and incredibly uncomfortable, because I know that whatever I do may later be challenged.
Other bank staff have left in the past and, after my experience over the last few months, I’m now planning to leave as well. I’ve never encountered anything like this before.
Has anyone experienced this while working in the NHS, whether in admin or another role? How did you know whose direction to follow, and how did you avoid being blamed when there wasn’t one agreed process?