Public sector seems not to care about serving the public

GOING shopping for stuff back in the day really was quite a chore.

Fighting through crowds to buy a telly or some clothes was never much fun and even worse when you had to find the receipt after finding out it didn’t work and you have to take it back.

Now, with the advent of the worldwide web, shopping is so much easier as you can get anything you want by just browsing on your phone followed by an email with your proof of purchase.

So convenient in fact has online shopping become that the Scottish Government appears to have adopted it for major public procurement projects.

Events this week have told us that disgraced former finance secretary Derek Mackay effectively bought two new ferries from Ferguson Marine by email.

The only problem after that is the Government then subsequently lost the receipt which got them into a spot of bother with finance watchdogs.

Audit Scotland, not unreasonably, wanted to see the official documentation that was used to justify the decision to award the contract to the Port Glasgow yard which had not entered the cheapest bid.

Like a school kid claiming the dog had eaten their homework, ministers collectively put their hands in their pockets, looked at their shoes and mumbled that they couldn’t find it.

Cue a political frenzy as opponents, islanders, Uncle Tom Cobley and various other folk all cried foul.

Auditor General Stephen Boyle, who had first raised the missing documents in the first place, wasn’t pleased and gave the Government a stern look and asked them, politely, to go and find them.

Help duly arrived on Wednesday when current Transport Secretary Jenny Gilruth arrived at Holyrood on her trusted steed and proclaimed that the missing email had been found at the 11th hour.

But cue utter contempt in the chamber when it was revealed that it was a one line email that said Derek Mackay had approved the contract so it could proceed.

More than six years on, the ferries remain unbuilt at Fergusons and are now three years late and the cost has risen to a staggering £240 million.

If only disgraced Derek, the convenient scapegoat, had kept the receipt then he could have gone back to the shop and exchanged the ferries for new ones but that’s the perils of online shopping I guess.

It really hasn’t been a good week for showcasing the public sector as a welloiled machine at all.

An investigation found this week that avoidable delays in isolating an elderly Covid patient are believed to have triggered outbreaks of the virus in a Lanarkshire hospital.

An internal review revealed the man – who had tested negative on presenting at A&E on December 27 2021 following a fall and a head injury – was not given a follow-up swab as he should have been on day five.

When a test was eventually carried out on day 10 of his hospital stay, by which time he had been transferred on to a second ward, the positive result was missed for a further three days because it was reported at 6.30pm on a Friday when infection prevention and control (IPC) staff had finished for the weekend.

During the week, the IPC team would be notified of any positive results between 8.30am and 4.30pm Monday to Friday, and alert the relevant ward, but investigators found that there was “no clear process for communicating positive Covid swab results after [4.30pm] on a Friday”.

Just think about that for a second and digest it.

A major Scottish hospital had no infection and control staff working after 4.30pm Monday to Friday with no cover at all over the weekend.

This during a pandemic and all at a time when were all staying at home to protect the NHS.

It’s just a good job that Covid is afraid of the dark and takes weekends off or else thousands of patients could have caught the virus while in hospital for other ailments and made the crisis worse.

Sadly, the two events highlight a sense of entitlement and complacency amongst many senior managers working in public services that is perhaps the main reason why so many are failing.

Imagine if the emergency services all clocked off at 4.30pm Monday to Friday?

Weekend working is a necessity in many jobs nowadays and should be particularly so in ones that exist to serve the public, who after all, pay their wages.

There are many thousands of hardworking staff across the public sector who do an excellent job and work extra hours, only to be consistently failed by managers who don’t seem to care about the public they are meant to serve.