Here, we share a few rants from BRI and Southmead colleagues with you, circulated in the print-version of Vital Signs no.3. Sometimes it’s good to let things out in order to be able to breathe again. At the same time we don’t want to become eternal whingers. We, as workers, have to take on the responsibility to change things. First of all, this means pushing back against management to struggle for better pay and conditions, which also includes better staffing in order to provide better care. Stop moaning, start organising. Send us your own rants!
Sickness absence – Things that just piss you off
My colleague has worked as a health care assistant for the Trust for 16 years. A year ago she developed incredible pain in her feet, which stopped her from working 12-hour shifts running around. She went to various GPs and specialists in order to find out what’s wrong with her. This took ages, due to NHS waiting lists. The doctors prescribed insoles and special shoes, which didn’t help. Trust management put her on a Stage 1, then Stage 2 absence meeting. After waiting a few more weeks to get an MRI scan, she finally managed to get an appointment with a specialised surgeon who suggested surgery. By that time she was put on a Stage 3 final sickness absence review meeting, which can end with dismissal. She asked if she could have the necessary surgery at her own Trust – but it would have taken 108 days to just get an assessment and much longer to get actual surgery. She finally decided to pay for surgery in a private hospital. During the Stage 3 absence meeting management openly said that if she could not have presented an exact day of her surgery, they would have had to ‘let her go’. Meaning, she would have been sacked from her NHS job that she worked in for 16 years if she had not gone private. What c*7%ts! The NHS waiting lists are too long, even too long to look after their own workers – which in turn increases staffing issues because people are off sick longer and no new workers are hired. Instead of being humble and apologetic about the NHS shortcomings, management considered sacking an NHS worker with years of service and experience. That pisses me off big time.
Irresponsible surgery planning
If you know the basics about surgeries then you know that it is more difficult to assess how much time it takes to do a revision surgery for a hip replacement compared to a straight-forward hip replacement. Despite this we had a situation where planners decided that the two hip replacements should be done first and the hip revision last. This is a deliberate decision, the logic being that if the revision takes too long, the hip replacements will be cancelled – so let’s have the revision last. This led to situations where we started working at 8am and finished at midnight or even 1:30am. Who seriously thinks that a surgeon or scrub nurse or a health care assistant can still do their best job for the patient after having worked for 13, 14, 15 hours?! Who drives home safely after such a long day? Yes, the waiting lists are long, but that’s not a natural calamity. Instead of investing proper money to create more capacity and hire more staff, workers and patients are put at serious risk. Instead of using money spent on military rearmament for a better public health system, more and more working class people are forced to decide: do I wait and suffer, because it takes two years to get a new knee, or do I go private and spend all my savings on that.
Piling on job tasks without consultation for theatre porters at the BRI
Theatre porters at the BRI are often understaffed. Unlike at Southmead, porters enter the theatres and help transfer the patient and transport them to the recovery area. End of September 2024, management sent a pretty patronising announcement that porters will have to do additional tasks. Apart from the usual ‘stocking up gloves’, there are tasks such as cleaning theatre floors and carrying a bleep and being responsible for blood collection in emergencies. One of the reasons for why management wants to increase job tasks reads like this: “It has been greatly spoken about by various staff members that the porters do have a lot of un-utilized down time”. Relying on idle gossip and not consulting the porters as a group sucks!
