A £52k diversity matron. A £114k gender consultant ...how the Health Service fritters away your taxes
WHO could argue with an extra £12billion a year for the NHS to catch up with operations and other treatments following the Covid pandemic? We have a record six million people who need treatment, 300,000 of whom have been waiting for more than a year. Clearing this backlog has been the Government’s justification for the 1.25 per cent rise in National Insurance contributions, due to take effect in April.
Yes, of course the NHS needs money and the healthcare system has suffered a huge blow from the pandemic. But can we be sure these extra billions will be spent on frontline services – or will a fat slice be diverted into fashionable causes? Sadly, a trawl through the jobs that the NHS is advertising this week gives little confidence that the extra money will be spent wisely – and rekindles fears of the scale of waste in our National Health Service.
A MATRON FOR INCLUSION, BUT NO MENTION OF BED SORES
IS THE NHS primarily there to treat us when we are ill – or to socially engineer Britain into a fairer society? Diversity has become a whole industry within the health service, with its practitioners earning half as much again as the average nurse.
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is advertising for a Workforce, Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Mental Health, based in Hove, East Sussex. The bumf reads: ‘We are looking for a Workforce Diversity and Inclusion Lead to join our team, supporting our work to put people at the heart of everything we do. This post plays a pivotal role in the Trust, ensuring diversity and inclusion is a core part of how we recruit, develop and deploy our workforce.’
The salary is between £47,126 and £52,219. By contrast, the average nurse’s pay before the pandemic, as calculated by the Royal College of Nursing, was £33,384.
A matron used to be a revered figure – someone who would breathe fear into junior nurses and doctors alike with demanding, nononsense standards as to how wards should be run.
Now, it seems, the job is as likely to be ensuring staff meet diversity quotas. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust is advertising for a Matron for Well Being, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. The job, which commands a salary of £47,126 to £52,219, is described as ‘an exciting opportunity of a corporate Matron role to Lead on Staff Well Being and Equality’.
Nothing about eliminating bed sores – or indeed anything about looking after patients.
CAN YOU DEPATHOLOGISE GENDER DIVERSITY?
GENDER dysphoria – where people experience a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity – has been a long-recognised condition.
Happily the NHS has, for decades, been able to offer help to people who experience such feelings.
But the latest initiative by Devon Partnership NHS Trust reads less as a job for a trained doctor than one as someone fresh from a gender studies degree at university.
Their Consultant in Gender Healthcare, who will command a salary of between £84,559 and £114,003, will be expected to help to ‘depathologise gender diversity’. The advert states: ‘The Service accepts gender diversity as one facet of human experience and recognises that gender diverse people often experience difficulty in gaining recognition and the respect of others, including from some healthcare practitioners. We seek to help them overcome exclusion and discrimination. We value them and recognise the contribution that they make to society.’
Apparently, according to the advert, ‘gender-diverse’ people often have healthcare needs specific to them, some of which ‘may result from internalised transphobia and minority stress’.
All very fashionable – but perhaps not the best appointment to help to try to clear that backlog of six million operations and other urgent treatments.
PURVEYOR OF CORPORATE GOBBLEDEGOOK ON £100k
STILL waiting for a hip operation? I’m not sure I would look to the Director of NHS at NHS England and NHS Improvement for help.
The new appointment, on a salary of £100,000, will apparently be ‘a dynamic individual who will lead NHS Horizons, accelerate the delivery of large-scale transformational change and develop a cadre of transformational leaders across the health and care system’.
The post holder, it goes on to say, ‘will lead the design and delivery of support interventions for national priority programmes and needs to have the commercial and organisational experience to ensure that the team delivers high quality support to all its clients and achieves its income goals’.
I am sure that this kind of stuff goes down very well at conferences but, on balance, I think I would rather have a GP, or three nurses, for the same money.
EMPLOYING PATIENTS TO HELP WITH TREATMENTS
TIME was when doctors were expected to complete long years of training before taking up their posts. Even now, if you wanted treatment for, say, a kidney stone, you would expect to be treated by a skilled urologist – not by someone who had been employed chiefly because they could empathise with you on the grounds that they, too, had suffered from a kidney stone.
But things seem to work differently in mental health. Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is advertising for an Advanced Lived Experience Development Lead, on a salary of £40,057 to £45,839, the chief qualification for which appears to be that the applicant must have suffered emotional difficulties. The bumf states: ‘We are looking for someone with lived experience of complex emotional difficulties, a core mental health profession, an interest in leading on Knowledge and Understanding Framework (KUF) training for us, and wanting to learn about and train, or be training or already trained, in the delivery of evidencebased psychological therapies and approaches.’
ENGAGE WITH THIS £45k LISTENING CONSULTANT
YOU might be struggling to get an appointment with your GP, but you might have better luck getting a consultation with the Engagement Manager which Mid Essex Clinical Commissioning Group seeks to appoint on a salary of £40,057 to £45,839.
The job seems to be to listen to patients and the public – something you might hope NHS managers were doing anyway.
The advert states: ‘This role is for a strategic engagement specialist who has a track record of delivering best practice and innovative engagement activities. The post holder will have experience of planning and delivering high quality resident involvement, including consultations across complex and politically sensitive environments.’