In 1983 when I joined the London Ambulance Service it was reckoned to be one of the best, if not the best Ambulance service in the world. Following massive Re-organisation and efficiency savings post 2000 it has today deteriorated to a point where it is crying out for help and cannot cope with normal seasonal variations in demand. Management of it, and ill-informed interference from successive Governments, is still not being identified as the cause of its tragic collapse, but everything and everyone else around it is. They blame its staff for sickness, strike action and leaving its employ and even the public for excessive demand on its services. They blame the area of training which they hived off to private sector training institutions for profit, at the same time inflating both qualifications necessary to do the job, as well as the cost of training which shifted onto the students themselves to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds each. The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust is not even today providing anything like the range of services to the public that The London Ambulance Service did back at the time I joined. It has offloaded to the private sector by far the larger area of its operation, namely its non-emergency workload, long ago. Until management and Governments (and, perversely enough, the health sector trade Unions) admit their culpability in this utter catastrophe and return to direct entry recruitment and in-house, fully funded training; being of a high quality and practical nature, rather than the current exploitative and pseudo-academic shambles, Londoners health, wellbeing and very lives will continue to be put at ever increasing risk. Managers must also be re-educated (Or as necessary be replaced) to Serve their staff and not to presume to Rule over them. Just sayin #NHS #CameronMustGo bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-30479554
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 13:47:32 +0000
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