News of collapse came as no surprise to me
THE current news of the collapse of Carillion, a name unfortunately evocative of M60 roadworks, comes as no surprise.
In the summer last year I attended a local interview for a job with this firm at which they promised they would let me know the outcome.
When they duly did not I emailed the HR department only to get no reply.
Thinking Carillion needed to be appraised of a communication problem it had, I wrote a letter to their CEO. No reply.
I then wrote a letter to the chairman. Again, no reply. I expect Carillion’s creditors had the same sort of experience as mine.
Carillion’s behaviour has been sadly symptomatic of many businesses and employment agencies in the Stockport/Manchester area.
Every week they write jobholder specifications for customer service, sales or administration posts so vague as to attract a large swathe of applicants.
Having rewarded themselves with these now all they need do, beyond getting their laptops to issue a few automatic acknowledgments, is merely to sit on their laurels, deleting hundreds of unsuccessful CVs without a word to their owners.
The example of Carillion serves as a salutary reminder of the dangers of giving large sums of money and government contracts to private firms, especially when the firms concerned practise mushrooms management, namely keeping stakeholders in the dark. D Wright, Nelstrop Road, Heaton Chapel
SAY NO TO CHANGES
AS the perfect storm of NHS underfunding, bed closures and a shortage of staff results in another winter crisis, many of us say that we say this coming.
So might the government. Why? Because it is deliberate.
A well known scenario of defund a service, make people angry so that they lose faith, then offer up a solution – privatisation.
Already the private health sector is booming as people denied operations or on long waiting lists are paying for their own care.
As a result shareholders, including many elected representatives in the UK, are gaining too.
The thing is that government plans for the NHS are well advanced and take the form of accountable care organisations (ACOs) based on the American model of health care tied in with private providers and health insurance.
ACOs are funded per head of the population that they cover.
Once this money has been used, then there is no more. Care will not be based on need, but on cost.
In Stockport plans for an ACO are underway.
This is called Stockport Together. The planners tell us that privatisation is not part of these local plans, but the legislation to allow ACOs states that private providers may run these organisations.
Trouble is even parliament and the public are not being allowed to debate these changes.
We should say no to these fundamental changes to our health services and ask our MPs and councillors instead to fight for reinstatement of our NHS back to it’s original principles and funding equal to that in other European countries. Deborah Hind, Bramhall Lane South, Bramhall
WORST DAY OF HIS LIFE
THESE are the words of a 20-year-old medical orderly spoken to my dad on April 16, 1945.
He said: “Babies had been born there, a mother, driven mad with hunger, screamed at me to give her ‘milch für meine kinder’ and thrust the tiny mite into my arms.”
Then she wandered off unable to shed just one tear as she was so dehydrated.
He said, as I opened the bundle, I found that the baby had been dead for days. As he told us what he had seen, he really was in a bad way, with tears in his eyes, his whole being was trembling uncontrollably.
As he wandered off he said: “That day was the worst day of my life.”
Rumour has it that he was repatriated soon after.
Poor kid.That camp was Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Kenneth Gibbons, Bents Avenue, Bredbury
SING PRAISE OF OUR NHS
THIS is a letter to one of your regular correspondents who had a letter published in the edition of January 10.
Your frequent, blinkered tirades on almost anything are becoming tedious.
Why not, for once, make a sensible and positive remark about something like the increasing number of ‘managers’ in our much-loved NHS whose managerial experience is often inadequate and whose salaries could pay for more hospital staff and doctors who actively do all the work with dedication, skill and compassion that is too often overlooked or taken for granted. We should be grateful to them for carrying on under the ‘dead hand’ of management.
Let us save some money here and put it where it will be used to some advantage. Name and address supplied