Slow blogging week

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!