Slight writers block for me this week. It isn’t that I haven’t been busy, or maybe that is the reason that I have struggled with good ideas to blog about. I have just spent 2 days helping to facilitate a management course which has involved me spending time away from the office and away from my current day job. Because this was a meeting of my previous role and my current one. The facilitating was part of what I used to do, something I am comfortable with, and the delegates for the course were from the new one; they were commissioners. So the discussion was useful and interesting to me, and I could engage in my favourite occupation of recent times; listening, asking questions and storing information for future use. This kind of work, much as going on a course yourself, is incredibly tiring. I am not sure if this is because you have to think so much more about what you are doing, or because it is much more intensive, but at least I have felt I have achieved something.

Today it is back to the day job, but a late start to meet a manager from the hospital local to my house about children’s and maternity services gives me time to blog and have that extra cup of coffee (or two, I must try and cut that down!)

It is with relief that I realise that this is the last friday of the financial year. We can only hope that 2007/8 will be a more pleasant one for those of us who work in the NHS. However, for some of my colleagues, this week will bring their 3 month notice from their employers, because if no suitable alternative employment has been found for them by 30th June they will be redundant. These are not ineffective people who have not previously been of use to the organisation, and they are not sitting around doing nothing, they are doing work no one else either is or can do. What is more they will not be cheap to get rid of, and hopefully they will not be dispensed with in this way.

The people I have met over the last 2 days, most of whom work in other PCTs rather than my own, have all been through the same process as me. Many are now doing new jobs, or variations on their old ones, but all of us (without exception) are carrying battle scars from the very process we have all been through in the last 20 months or so. Luckily for the NHS some good people have been retained, and enthusiasm and hard work is returning, but for others the belief is that the scrap heap beckons, and that scrap heap will be expensive because you can’t get rid of people with 30 years service without paying them off!

I am sometimes accused, both online and in real life of taking the things people say a bit too literally, I guess it is just the kind of person I am. I hate to see generalisations and assumptions made in some kind of sweeping statement. But imagine getting death threats because of your blog! Apparently for Kathy Sierra this has become a horrifying reality, and she has been forced to stop writing her blog and cancel a presentation she had been due to make.  It begs the question, why? and exactly what is wrong with people that they make violent and sexual threats against a woman because they don’t like what she writes and that she is successful in a male dominated profession. Has the world gone quite mad?

I as do many others who blog about their work or private lives, try to remain anonymous, but it is difficult to maintain that anonymity completely at the same time as trying to give a flavour of what my life is about. Some people do write fiction on their blogs and websites, but for most of us bloggers it is the reality that makes it readable for others. Certainly makes you think though doesn’t it?

You wonder why you got out of bed. I guess when you drive to work and find yourself in the wrong place for a meeting, drive to another town and find the meeting cancelled, you look back at the moment you realised you had over slept and wonder why you didn’t just go back to sleep at that point! The day after the clocks advance an hour is always a strange one, as that is when you realise you have lost that hour somewhere and you definitely need it back.

Apart from cancelled meetings,  I am still settling into the job, and for now the pace is reasonably leisurely, I know this won’t last and it is hard to make the most of it. One good thing is that I have time to fit in reading for my dissertation which is a godsend given that I am often reasonably weary by the evening. I am sure, though that this job is going to be good for blogging tales, a whole new group of folks to talk about. Just nothing really going on today!

These images are just great, thanks to Echoes of Gracie for the link! Don’t you just love the Internet for these kinds of things? When teen son first decided he wanted his first website, there was no blogger or wordpress, the whole thing took ages while he typed up his pages, with links, including music! into the Microsoft web-page thing the name of which escapes my memory. Then I learned how to use FTP to upload it all. Now of course that it is all so easy to do, he doesn’t want such a thing. Now he could do it himself, it is all a bit passe!

This week Matt, who is 16 came up with the idea of going to a Metallica concert at the new Wembley stadium in July with his cousin also 16. Sometime between me telling his I didn’t think he should go on Monday and now, he has bought himself a ticket. Which just brings home how much authority, let alone influence I appear to have over his actions now he is 16. But it is the way that he gets round me that is most scary, when did I ever become such a soft touch?

Thirteen Things Julie gets irritated by Following my last post, where I outlined my irritation with a person who allowed their mobile phone to ring during a meeting, here are 13 other things that irritate me. I might have done something like this before, but I am sure these will be a bit different. Banks and their charges, you go a little over drawn and they hit you with big charges completely out of context with the original amount and the amount it costs them to apply the charge. Well I am in the process of reclaiming charges from one bank! The BBC and their little soundbites telling us how terrible the NHS currently is. Of course I work in it, so am fully aware of its short comings, but that doesn’t prevent me getting annoyed with some of the sweeping statements that get made. My husband when he settles down on the sofa in a recumbent position after dinner, then blames me when two hours go by without him noticing. If you don’t want to sleep, don’t lie down! My son who cannot wait. Once he gets an idea in his head, he has to do the thing there and then. Unless of course it involves doing something for me! This week it was about concert tickets, next week it will be something else. Traffic, on Tuesday it took me 45 minutes longer to make my journey to work than it did yesterday. How can you plan your day around that? Politics; Tony, just get on with resigning and handing the country over, I am getting fed up with hearing all about it and Gordon Brown is looking as smug as David Cameron these days. Shame we can’t get ourselves some proper people to be our leaders! The weather; last week it was unnaturally warm, and this week winter again. It is meant to be spring, so I want it to get warmer again please. Not being able to sleep. A combination of teen son’s ticket booking antics and hubby’s irritation that he couldn’t wait, plus the cat wanting food at 5.30 ended up with me waking up too early and not being able to sleep. Weight loss. Why isn’t it as easy to lose weight as it is to put it on. Having said that, I am on target for a 2lb loss this week. University library one week loans. I forgot to renew my books on a weeks loan yesterday (online) so will have to go down there and give them in today as a punishment. Research methods terminology. Keeping on the subject of university, I am struggling with all the long words these academics use. I guess it helps them keep their world private and exclusive. TV reality shows. We have had dancing, singing, a dancing dog, auditions for the sound of music and ice skating. That has to be enough! People who get irritated by too many things; Oh thats me!!! Of course I am not irritated by myself!

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Mobile (cell) phones, whatever did we do without them? How did we manage our lives without being contactable at all times of the day and night? There seem to be few places where we can’t be disturbed either by our own phones going off or other peoples. There have been occasions when I could understand that people have needed to keep their phones switched on during a meeting but even the most important person can turn the thing to silent, vibrate or whatever, we don’t all have to suffer the full extent of a happy clappy ring tone! Yesterday I was at a meeting to discuss the future of urgent services for children. The whole concept of what exactly is meant by this government produced word ‘urgent’ will be covered on this blog on another day in the not very distant future. But at the meeting were a number of people both from the PCT, from our acute trusts and also GPs. So who was so important they needed to let all of us know it? The on call Paediatrician? No, it was the director of planning (whatever job that involves) from the trust. And this happened not once but twice, and did he get up and actually take the call? No he didn’t he allowed it to go to voice mail and then listened to the message during the meeting. Quite amazing behaviour in my humble opinion! Maybe tomorrow, I’ll do a Thursday 13 on the things that annoy me!

I have been saddened and moved over the weekend by the news of the death of Sally Clark, a woman wrongly accused of killing her two children and released from prison in 2003. There have been too many cases recently of people, and in particular parents who have been subjected the terrible experience of a miscarriage of justice. For any parent, and I would say a mother in particular the death of your child is the worst thing you can imagine happening. When my son was new born I could hardly bear to think of such an event, and found the fact he was born during a time of war (the first gulf war) disturbing enough. How then do you cope with the loss of 2 children and then being accused of murder because a medical expert says it is nigh on impossible that 2 children could die of cot death in the same family.

Once people are accused of a crime, there is an assumption by many that the person is guilty, they are vilified in the press and are often badly treated within their own communities and in prison. At lunchtime today as I traveled to a meeting, I heard a radio discussion on this matter. Angela Cannings another wrongly convicted mother spoke of her own struggles since release and of the lack of support people receive. Movingly she spoke of her daughter’s struggle to cope with the consequences of being separated from her mum at a young age and her husbands mental health problems.

As a nation we are quick to apportion blame. People seem reluctant to accept responsibility for their actions and that includes helping people like Sally and Angela. Yesterday was mother’s day here in the UK, I was surrounded by my own family, visiting my own mum with my brothers and their families and spending a pleasant day. But for one family, for one child there was no mum to give a card, present and kisses to. For them their lives changed when Sally Clark was wrongly accused.

I accidentally deleted a couple of comments which were caught in my spam filter, so am putting links here and here

The computer I use at home isn’t really like this one, and anyway the screen didn’t crack. But yesterday was definitely one of those days. I took the day off to get ahead with the essay which is due in on Monday, and I made reasonable progress. But I am definitely not psychic, because if I was I would have pressed ahead with it rather than surfing blogs, going for lovely walks in the sun in between worrying about phenomenology and the like.

Last night though, the laptop was taken suddenly very ill, and after much messing about I decided to take the drastic decision to reinstall windows! This resulted in the loss of more files than I could shake a stick at and the need to reinstall quite a bit of software including office. Luckily I have all of my academic work on my memory stick as well as the hard drive, so I didn’t have the nervous breakdown I might have had.

The result is that I still have 1000 words to write, and I have my mum to visit tomorrow for mothers day and 13 people to cook Sunday lunch for (me and my big mouth). Sometimes I just wish I was one of those people who like to finish things in really good time!

I have limited experience of the concept of patients or users as we must call them being involved in the planning and organisation of services. When I was plying my trade of nursing whether hospital, community as a district nurse or as a specialist nurse it would be true to say that the views of our patients and their relatives / carers were considered interesting but not vital to how we did things. The patient’s Charter changed all that, and over the past few years patient involvement forums and the like have grown. Now when any service changes are being made, or even if we are just making sure they are the right services at all, we have no choice but to involve users.

So today I became involved with the whole user thing at a meeting about maternity services. It was fascinating stuff, because the term seems to mean anything you like. It means people who do work for the National Childbirth Trust, it means women complete with babies they are still breastfeeding and toddlers who play with their my little ponies on the floor in front of you, and it means old ladies of about 75 who belong to the local hospital action group and are still describing their own childbirth experiences. You can’t pay for entertainment like this and still be paid yourself. I am going to love this job.

For the first time in several months I have a spring in my step and purpose to my days. Just a week into the new job, and I already feel different. I have new work, new people I am getting to know and I am getting stuck into trying to achieve a new me (one more like my little icon picture and less like the woman on the scales below). The one slight spanner in the works is the assignment I need to complete for next Monday, and which I am kind of struggling with. I have read lots of books in an attempt to work out all of the philosophical stuff that underpins our understanding of research. Healthcare of course with its reliance on experimentation, randomised controlled studies and the like is at one end of the spectrum and  the study I am going to do which will ask about the value of action research is likely to be somewhere near the other end. This is going to be about the truth we construct ourselves, about people’s personal ideas about what something like action learning does for them, how it helps them to be a better leader, or feel more supported in their job (or not as the case may be). This assignment is about my understanding of the principles of research and my journey in discovering my ontological and epistemological position (answers on a postcard as quick as you can please!) So that I can be clear as to why I am asking a particular question and using the most appropriate methodology to complete my research. It is just as well work is in no way stressful at this moment in time!!

Yesterday, I bought clothes without trying them on. Stupid I know, as I know I have put on some weight since Christmas, but I was slightly delusional at the time. I have decided that rather than take these items back, I will aim to be able to wear them in the next few weeks. In a kind of naming and shaming way, you will now (if you care) be able to see my progress from a BMI of over 30!! (Look under my weather pixie) My first 2lb is off, but I have lots to go. I want this to be a slimmer, fitter summer. Wish me luck!

Picture from Minnie Pauz

Now enough of the 2 posts in a day fiasco, time to go and write an essay!

When I was a student nurse, I was salaried. I have to say the pay was very low, but I was only 18 with no one to support but myself and I managed. Things these days are very different, a few students are on a salary, these are usually people who have already been working as healthcare assistants and have been sponsored by their NHS trust to go off for 3 years to undertake nurse training. Everyone else receives a bursary of under £6000 a year, a level which the RCN points out is less than the minimum wage. In the past most nurses who have wanted a job after qualifying have been able to get one, but in the last couple of years, recruitment freezes have meant that new nurses (and doctors, physios, OTs etc) have found it increasingly difficult to secure that first job. Some nurses have even been encouraged to take work on a voluntary basis to get the experience they need before finding paid employment.

Many people studying for a diploma or degree in nursing are still school leavers, but many more are not. They have families to support, childcare to pay for and increasingly they have to travel long distances between hospital / community sites as part of their clinical practice experience. I guess that is why this campaign has been launched. We all know that premiership footballers are over paid and under-worked (if you can call running around a football pitch work) so perhaps they are a good group to target. I think it is great that this is being done, but it shouldn’t be like this.

It costs thousands of pounds to train a nurse, but nursing as a profession is not really valued. The nurses themselves appear only too often to want to use their period of training as a way to bigger and better things. There seems an increasing desire to become some kind of specialist before they have applied their trade in a general way, and this must partly be down to the salary paid after qualifying and the fact that other disciplines appear to be able to earn more doing a generalist job. Nurses shouldn’t be a charity case, they should be paid a living wage, they should be paid for the work they do and they should be able to afford to remain working as nurses who actually provide care for patients. Meanwhile, if premiership footballers are willing to give up a day’s pay then what better charity case than nurses?

My former colleagues moved offices yesterday, so that really is the end of my involvement with the area of education and training, save a few emails and phone calls I might have to redirect. So how do I feel now it is over? Well firstly a little sad that they have moved, especially as I have worked with one of them for over 5 years. We built up the department together, have been through a number of internal and larger reorganisations and have reinvented and rebranded ourselves at least twice. We built up a good local reputation, we had to be able to multi task as for a long time there was just the 2 of us to run the whole department.

My second feeling though is one of relief. I am passionate about education, about learning and the way that people develop in their jobs so that they can do them more effectively and not to mention safely. I love to deliver education myself, to facilitate groups, to do the nice things, but the rest of it they can keep. The department has to increasingly be run on a shoe string, as the value of education to the organisation decreases, indeed I am being replaced by a back care advisor / trainer!

Someone sent me the link to a job advert yesterday, it looked like a good job, head of training and education in the private sector. This is likely a job I could do, but I don’t think it is one I want to do. The person who sent it to me seemed surprised that I chose to take this change in direction, she assumed I had been pushed into it for lack of other opportunities. It might be true to say that given a choice of jobs it might not have been my first, but I am clear about one thing, from now on I am going to take control of my own destiny. The reason I have left education at this time is because they wanted to push me into a supporting role in the team, one where I would have picked up much of the portfolio of work without having the authority of the person in charge. In this new job, I am not in charge, except of myself and that feels kind of refreshing. I can learn new things, take on new challenges and hopefully be valued for who I am again.

Cups that is. Arsenal play some lovely football, the trouble is no one seems to be able to get the ball into the net. It seems like everyone wants to take part in the whole kick about thing, but when it comes to taking responsibility for scoring, no one can quite do it. So in the last couple of weeks, we have been knocked out of all 3 cup competitions (including losing one of them in the final). I feel most sorry for teen son who is at the moment travelling home on the train. On top of seeing his team lose, he has been on a school maths trip! What a day!

My first few days in the new job involve me going to quite a few meetings, and much as I loathe this kind of encounter generally in the NHS, mainly because they are often an ineffective way of people wasting a couple of hours, at the moment they help me get to know who is who and what is what. Luckily my new boss is both knowledgeable and well respected which means I will learn lots quickly, but also makes me nervous about some how letting the side down. The world of maternity and children’s services is at the least interesting, it is also not entirely difficult to grasp the issues, so I am hopeful that this is a job I can enjoy and hopefully do well in. I think there will undoubtibly be some new things to blog about, and that can’t be bad!

A new job is quite tiring, I guess it involves having to concentrate so much more than usual, trying to remember new names, new terminology and a whole new world. This is not helped tonight by hubby getting seriously stressed by Chelsea going 1-0 behind in the first few minutes of the Champion’s League match tonight. A few choice words are being flung around the living room as I type this. We can only hope it doesn’t as I fear end in tears! Tomorrow teen son is off to the Emirates to see Arsenal in the same competition, never a dull moment!