Our PCT and all the NHS trusts around us are in the red and have been so to a greater or lesser degree for some time. At the beginning there was something called the NHS bank, and there was a degree of leniency, after all we were incredibly target driven and meeting targets needs people to do stuff; lots of people. Now the plug has been pulled on credit, a bit like reaching your over draft limit at the bank and the manager saying no more. This means that across the health economy cuts are being put into place. For about 9 months we have had a vacancy freeze and we have all been charged with finding ways of saving money, but now things are about to get more serious, more drastic. So drastic that I and my team, along with the Human Resources department are about to get training on how to career coach people.

In the midst of all this, we have been working on some new documentation to help people through each year up to their appraisal. We have called it the Journey Planner. A hell of a lot of work has gone in to it, and it is pretty good (even if I say so myself and I do). It allows the employee to record their interactions with their manager, reflections on learning, more formal education including mandatory training and finally documents the appraisal. We want to launch this document, after all, people need to have appraisals, and it is a really good piece of work. A colleague knows a real English Lord, she has asked him to come help us launch, he is really happy to do so. The chief exectutive and my own director have agreed to this, but that was before the redundancies which have yet to be announced to those who they will affect were decided upon.

It was suggested to me yesterday that we cannot launch our Journey Planner, we cannot do anything that suggests we are ignoring peoples feelings, that seems as if we are not in touch with reality. When I told this person that we were going to provide a light lunch at the launch (only one hours duration at lunch time) she nearly collapsed in apoplexy. I told her I wasn’t prepared to waste the hours of work we have put into this as this was wasting the trusts money if nothing else was, she said she too had had to shelve things that she had done too. Well that’s ok then!

I am not sure if we will go ahead, I will discuss this with my manager on Monday, but if I am going to be responsible for creating bad feeling, then I want no part of the whole thing. In fact it again makes me wonder just what my place in this mad and crazy system is!

On a happier note, yesterday was my wedding anniversary, we have made it to 22 years and tonight are off to see Sinatra at the London Palladium. More about that in the next day or two.