DCH crisis: Health workers' fears disregarded (From Dorset Echo)

DCH crisis: Health workers' fears disregarded

9:54am Friday 27th August 2010 in

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I REFER to former Dorset County Hospital chairman Robin Sequira’s response to the avalanche of criticism surrounding the accrual of a £5million debt at Dorset County Hospital (DCH) and its consequences (Your Say, August 19).

However, it does little to answer the many serious accusations voiced by patients, hospital staff and the general public.

It also shows a disregard for the feelings of many health workers who have been variously reported in the Echo as being in ‘tears of rage and frustration’, have ‘never seen top management on the wards in the last two years’ and who have described senior management as ‘pen-pushers in ivory towers’ and so on.

The most informative correspondence concerning the disgraceful situation at DCH was contributed by Dr Jon Orrell (‘Publicly Fund and Protect the NHS’, Your Say, July 30).

His letter describes the way in which self-serving executives and management consultants conspire to plunder public financial resources. A debt of £5million does not occur mysteriously of its own accord, whether or not the DCH was underfunded.

It was the result of poor management and I find Mr Sequira’s attempt to shift the blame as nauseating as Tony Blair’s recent donation towards better treatment of army service casualties.

As Dr Orrell said so pointedly ‘We do not need fly-by-night executives and hatchet-men running off with all the spare cash leaving pain clinics and physiotherapy struggling with unfilled posts’.

DCH is only one example of the way in which the NHS and other public bodies are being bled dry by management bureaucracy and the cancerous over-use of management services.

It’s time public service management was made accountable and paid on results.

They consider themselves the equals of private sector mangers when they talk about salaries and pensions but in my experience some of them would never succeed in the hard competitive world outside.

They would certainly need to talk to the troops a lot more which seems to have been a problem in Dorchester.

CMD Joslin, Garfield Avenue, Dorchester