Talking to a friend of the missus today who is a pediatric nurse. She works for an agency and works three days a week. The rate…..£65 an hour. That’s what she gets so god knows what the agency are charging.

And they say the NHS needs more funding.

It's always been the way. About 15 years ago the bloke sitting next to me on a flight from Heathrow to Sydney was an anaethetist, originally from South Africa. He worked in London but didn't like the British climate so his family lived in Oz. He worked 3 months on, 1 month off in a big London hospital on an agency contract. I forget what he said he was paid, but it was an eye-watering amount, and the hospital also provided gratis a nice flat in central London.

Probably 2 or 3 times that.
The NHS needs more long term planning of workforce requirements/training but the UK only does short term now.
Some hospital have a real problem recruiting especially in isolated towns like Scarborough/Workington/Carlisle where they are just general hospitals without the "sexy" specialties the big hospitals have.They are often seen by doctors as not being an attractive thing to put on your cv and staff shortage are a real problem and the vultures of the agencies hover.

Also be interesting to see the ratio of clinical to non- clinical personnel employed at a typical Trust.

It is available usually in the Annual report but you have lots of staff like porters,cleaners, CSSD (clinical cleaning of equipment etc) laundry etc etc who are as important as the frontline staff (doctors & nurses).

The staff maintaining the upkeep of the hospital aren’t the problem, the problem are the paper shufflers and desk warriors, I had 10 years of it before I retired and I could tell you a few stories to make your eyes water.

Yes me too. I did over 20 years and the problem is a lot of these Admin types have no experience in the real world. They are institutionalised lifers who if out in a real commercial organisation would last about 10 minutes.

We had a ‘golden corridor’ where they existed in an alternative reality.

The problem with government run departments is they are institutionalised, ask why they do tasks this way etc, they reply is because we always have.
In the early 2000s I was working on Job Centres updating them as some got an electrical shock from a desk, the electrical systems were all upgraded, to this day I believe it was static due to the floor coverings reacting to the persons clothing.
A few years later a decision was made to amalgamate the Job Centres with the Social Security offices, I worked on a couple, gutted them more or less nice shiny new desks, Self Service Computer terminals where you search for a job etc cost millions. Great for me as it was a great earner but what did it actually achieve after costing millions, nought and the Self Service Terminals were removed so you could search for a job.

you can talk to anyone who has either left or retired from the organisation and they,ll tell you exactly the same. just wonder how many pen pushers and these new inclusion and diversity bods save lives which is really the object of hospitals in the first place. bloody rainbow crossings outside the one i use. load of bollocks and it will cost em something for sure. suppose without this crap nobody would recover from the illness they went in for in the first place.dont get me on about maternity units either with their discriptions of pregnant women ready to give birth. even lunatics could run asylums better than this.

By the way. I was looking at this weeks budget yesterday and it struck me that it’s almost identical to Liz Truss’ manifesto and yet no huge outcry. Proof of it were needed of the agenda to get Sunak in place

Top heavy on management side within trusts, then you've got all the government agency bids taking a wage.
The whole thing needs a massive overhaul with the end result being maximum effort by front line and necessary support staff, but minimise the waste on clerical, management, and diversity staff. Governments continually throw more and more cash and get less efficiency and productivity while demanding results in every other sector.

Basically means privatising the NHS or bringing in a private company to evaluate the NHS but what’s to say any organisation would not have the government’s eyes out.

there are so many people who still love the NHS who would be out in the streets protesting if the word privatisation was ever mentioned. its some national treasure that does not look like the same one that originally was thought up. its something any government should have a serious talk about instead of the constant political row between both party,s in how much more money each spend on it where nothing seems to improve. there are always alternatives to everything and not looking at better is only a waste of the money we put into it via our taxes.

No it needs streamlining …… cull the paper clip crew, too many chiefs and not enough ‘injuns’.

Yes but who is going to do it, what the NHS along with other government departments require is a Work Study Engineer/Time and Motion person, at the end of the week ask the employee what their job responsibilities were and what have they achieved in the past week.

The job title is …’planning applicator’..that was my job once, aka…the ‘bonus man’.

The issue isn’t the NHS it’s what they’re allowed to pay staff. Plenty of newly qualified doctors can locum 2/3 days a week and earn more than if worked a week. Or if they want to move abroad can earn double or triple that within the NHS. If the wages for nurses and drs was increased then staff retention would increase and you’d lose the need for agency staff and locums etc.

I have Believed persons of interest are placed in posistions of power, And believed it for some time.
Boris, Shoerack, Cameron(again), Good ole Joe in the USofA.
And of course never forgetting the Bushies (Family).

Keeping an eye on Spanish one now.

We are following the American Line nicely.Chugging along.
Won,t be long now.
How many times lately have you been advised to see/ask a Pharmacist.

Check out your GP surgery on line you should somewhere on the site find the average salary.
Mine stands at £140,000 a year.
Try and get an appointment.

The expectations of the public and scientific advances have contributed to the scope creep of the NHS. There was a featured item on the Beeb this week about a review of funding for a drug treating cystic fibrosis. There was a couple that have a 7 year old son that has improved with treatment costing £100k+ per year. His treatment means he could live to 80. Their complaint was that this treatment would not be available for babies born next year. She is pregnant. That means that even knowing the risk (both parents carry the gene causing CF) they decided to have another child.. and now complain that the rest of us won’t pay.

Why not allow university training for medical staff for free, they sign a legally bound contract to commit themselves to work in the NHS for 5 years, if they leave before they have to pay the fees back ?

There's those that get paid "too much" whilst those like my youngest daughter who is a phlebotomist get paid about £18 per hour and travels between 2/3 hospitals in any one day (she does get her travelling expenses).

I don,t doubt it one bit.

Like solicitors, The goofers do all the leg work and are on very poor pay, If any at all.

Better still two days in the classroom and 3 days on the job.
I was talking with someone who trained with me and he actually asked me if college was worthwhile, because all the vital stuff was learnt ‘on the job’…but college is useful for theory,….but in all honesty, he was right.
He told me on his last job that electrical engineers were coming straight on the job and had no practical experience, which admittedly the engineers complained about too as they were at a disadvantage…… a bit like getting your driving licence and just taking the theory test.

I always find it's best to not offer advice if you don't know how things work...
For Jamie1952: Undergraduate medicine degrees have free tuition in the 5th year and postgraduate degrees are subsidized by a third for 3/4 years (in england) however due to fees for home students in wales and scotland this makes 3/4 years of graduate medicine free. You are basically legally bound to work in the NHS for 2 years for F1 and F2 as you need these to get a job abroad etc. Making them sign on for 5 years would be baffling due to the way getting onto these works, e.g. you're forced to move where they place you or defer your training for a year. Obviously people can drop out before working in the NHS and go work in a different job but is forcing someone to work a job they don't want to do, where mistakes can literally be the difference between life or death sensible?

Snowy: They do pretty much 50:50 on the job: classroom. Undergraduates have 2 years fully working in various hospital settings as well as 2/3/4 placements in their 1st 3 years. Postgraduates (which is a 4 year degree) have the same 2 years fully working in hospitals etc and again have placements in their other 2 years. These placements are at least a month long.

Thanks for the info but 2 years should be 5 years.

It doesn't work though. What's to stop a doctor who completes F2 and receives a job offer from Australia on double/triple the salary they will be earning just leaving? The way student finance works they can't be forced to repay the lump sum, it would be added to their account and this is only charged on UK payslips. So moving abroad is a win win for that person. It would work for people leaving medicine to work another job within the UK but again, the amount they payback is based on their earnings above a threshold so not really getting much back.

Nice to have some inside knowledge of the field, obviously electrical engeering is different, thanks for the info.

how about just cancelling all student debts for those who take up certain positions after they leave university after doing a certain number of years in the job, let those who do pointleess time wasting courses to pay for it all. they might then get off there arses when leaving school to just work instead.

big problem is many are good at theory but not the job and vice versa. to really get on you are better being good at paper work than you are on the job. you never seem to hear of chargehands and foremen getting promoted because they were the best doing the work they were originally employed to do. i certainly wasn,t.

When I was working they used as you said never make a good tradesman a Supervisor, you are taking a good man of the tools strangely enough I worked as a Supervisor quite a few times.

Good point Mr A…I was sent to college for a year to get my CMS which was the qualification needed for moving on up…..but within weeks of getting it someone informed me off the record, that I’d wasted my time, because I was in maintenance on the site, they asked who would replace me…and the penny dropped…he was right, a year wasted.