I know a hospital that has – by its management’s anti-seclusion and you-mustn’t-restrain-patients crusade – made its wards so violent and unsafe that as soon as a community post comes up, everybody working a ward job wants to escape there. (Don’t bother searching for it in the MSM, this type of news doesn’t get reported and published.)
Needless to say, that is not how to do it. The ideal solution is to attract and retain staff who feel called to serve in the community, not just someone who’s desperate to escape their current job. And for the wards, we need people with life experience, people prepared to get their hands dirty, people who care, but offer that care in a practical, grounded, level-headed manner. People who can get up early, go home late, work night shifts, stick it out when patients are on at them all shift. We need the opposite of snowflakes who faint at the sight of blood or the sound of swearing and go off sick when someone says hurty words to them.
Ok, that’s easy to say. How the hell do we get from the disaster that is here to there?
Make the job worth having again. Improve terms and conditions. Re-assess and alter funding priorities. Restore safety and protection at work. Radically improve selection. Foster and reward excellence. Restore pride in the job. Remove nurse education from ‘Universities.’ Strip all corrupted and twisted power from management, quangos, ‘regulators’ and the forces of ‘woke’. Undo decades worth of damage.
A. Terms and conditions. Non-wage benefits. Status.
This will include an employment contract that benefits the staff over the management. The old Whitley contract was an excellent example. Offer good salaries with annual increments to make sure we reward staff staying in the job, gaining experience and becoming better. A generous pension is essential. IMHO Britain would have to return to final salary schemes. That could be made affordable by massively reducing the numbers employed by the NHS (believe me, I have posts coming on who, how and why).
In fact why don’t we fund it by massive fines, confiscations, compulsory purchase of yachts, mansions, wine collections of the bankers, financiers and politicians who pocketed the gains they made from forcing defined contribution schemes onto young people. Am I right to remember it started on Brown’s watch? If so, it’ll be your pension we garnish first Lord (or Baron or whatever title they’ve rewarded him with) Brown. Ok, I’ve woken up from my pipe-dream, I’m back on earth, you can read on in safety.
There’ll be overtime if you want it, or courses and specialty qualifications if you want that instead. Or opportunities to conduct research, be published in journals and presenting at conferences if you prefer that. Make nursing a desirable, medium-high status career that not just anyone can walk into. For promotions and community jobs, applicants must have X years’ experience on the wards first to cut their teeth, actually see how and at what speed patients recover, what helps, what doesn’t, how to build therapeutic relationships etc. Encourage and reward and praise excellence. Attract people who want to be and belong with the best. The goal is to attract and retain the best people for the job who will stay for forty years, getting better every year and teaching and leading the younger ones.
Think about the numbers who apply for SAS and Royal Marines training compared to the final numbers who pass selection. Now think about how building an elite team, free to focus on excellence and getting even better is achieved by rejecting most applicants. Who wouldn’t want to be on that team? Did you know in some areas there are A and B Mountain Rescue Teams. All volunteers. People in the B team train to be good enough to try out for the A Team.
The pride and satisfaction in striving to and becoming the best is immeasurable. This energy is currently wasted by our muppets in charge who imagine uniformity and ‘consistency’ is a more desirable quality.
Continues in ‘How to get there from here Pt 1a’
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