David Craig, on August 25th, 2023Friday/weekend blog
On a recent blog, one reader remarked that had the paediatric doctors at Lucy Letby’s hospital reported her for misgendering anyone, Letby would have been disciplined and probably fired faster than you could say ‘transphobe’. But murdering premature babies, that was seemingly not a serious offence for our woke hospital bosses. And so, as the politicians and media promise us (yet another) ‘independent inquiry’ which will (yet again) ‘leave no stone unturned’ and will (yet again) lead to ‘important lessons being learnt’ and will (yet again) ‘ensure this never happens again’, our beloved NHS (which is the envy or the world) rushes ahead with hiring ever more DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers. As waiting lists shoot up towards eight million, as health services collapse and as thousands live in pain or die early or unnecessarily due to a lack of care, our NHS bosses seem convinced that the only way to save our NHS is by hiring more utterly pointless, sociology-degreed DIE parasites.
Let’s just take a moment to look at a few of the latest DIE vacancy ads:
Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
People Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer: Do you have a passion for equity and inclusion? Are you an excellent administrator with the skills to effectively manage a varied workload where workflows can change rapidly? Do you enjoy having a wide variety of tasks when you’re at work? If yes, this may be the role you are looking for. This is an exciting opportunity to join the Culture and Engagement team here at Sherwood Forest Hospitals and support making a difference for colleagues in the Trust
The successful candidate will support the delivery of the EDI work programme across Sherwood Forest Hospitals. The post holder will assist our staff networks in creating, developing, and executing action plans to effect positive change within the Trust.
Sorry to ask some stupid questions, but why does some (probably third-rate) hospital I’ve never heard of need a Culture and Engagement team including a People Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer? How many pointless bureaucrats are in this Culture and Engagement team? How much does this Culture and Engagement team cost us? WTF does a Culture and Engagement team have to do with patient care?
Kettering NHS Hospital Foundation Trust
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer: We have an exciting opportunity to join the HR team at Northampton General Hospital as Equality, Diversity and InclusionEngagement Officer, initially as a fixed-term contract to the end of March 2023. You will work with the new Group Head of OD and Inclusion and build on the positive foundations of work across the organisation.
Key part of the role will be to work closely with our four staff networks, being the primary point of contact and support for network Co-Chairs, and supporting the delivery of EDI initiatives across the organisation.
- Operate as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Engagement Officer within The Trust to provide advice and support to the wider organisation in terms of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
- To play a key role in the delivering of the Group EDI strategy at KGH
- To be part of the Group and support them to deliver on strategic HR Projects and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programmes.
- To prepare all RA Reports and other required EDI Reports at Trust, Regional or Trust level.
- To be part of KGH Diversity Recruitment Champion Panel
- To support the Senior Diversity and Inclusion Specialist with all communication for any Internal KGH EDI requirements and the Diversity Calendar
I apologise for asking some stupid questions. But why does a (probably crap) hospital like Northampton need a Group Head of OD and Inclusion and a Senior Diversity and Inclusion Specialist and an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer? What on earth do these people do all day? What do they contribute to patient care? Just how many people at Northampton hospital waste our money on fatuous DIE nonsense? Is there nobody at Northampton hospital who realises what a farce this pointless and expensive DIE industry is?
Hemel Hempstead
Senior Diversity and Inclusion Partner: Salary £70,000 to £75,000: The People function performs a vital role in supporting and shaping the organisation to meet its strategic goals and transition its culture and processes to continue to succeed and thrive. At the heart of the function’s delivery plan is the People & Organisation Performance Framework, which ensures our delivery of NHSP’s ambitions in key areas including Employee Value Proposition, Strategic Resourcing, Leadership and Culture and Diversity and Inclusion.
The Senior Diversity & Inclusion Partner, reporting into the Director of People will lead on the design, development and implementation of NHSP’s solutions to complex equality, diversity and inclusion challenges within the framework of relevant legislation and best practice. This will be delivered through a Diversity and Inclusion strategy which aligns to NHSP’s strategic objectives and achieves tangible improvements to the experience of all our people, measured through a variety of metrics throughout the employee lifecycle.
In spite of having worked in almost 100 organisations in 15 countries, there’s hardly a word in the above job description I understand. It’s just a pile of woke gobbledigook. I suppose by what they call “the People function” they mean the HR department, so the “Director of People” must be the HR manager. Quite why you would need a Senior Diversity and Inclusion Partner when you already have a HR manager escapes me. Yet the person employed by Hemel Hempstead as Senior Diversity and Inclusion Partner will be pocketing between £70,000 and £75,000 a year. Heaven knows how much the “Director of People” is getting paid.
Ever-increasing empires?
I have written in previous blogs about the scandalous waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of our money the NHS is squandering on hiring these complete waste-of-skin DIE staff. But in previous blogs, I have only mentioned individual vacancies. Here I hope to expose that there are actually growing empires of these worthless parasites in all our hospitals.
Maybe it’s time to scrap the woke, useless, collapsing NHS and just start again?
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I and close family members were before retirement, or still are, NHS medical professionals. FWIW neither of the currently employed doctors are participating or have participated in any of the strikes over pay, neither do they intend ever to do so. They consider their chosen profession a vocation, as did I mine before retirement, and feel a keen sense of responsibility towards their patients. That is not to say, though, that nurses do not merit better pay. They do. Without them hospital doctors could not function. The NHS is no longer fit for purpose. I, now in my eighties, in effect cannot access a GP. In extremis I would not even try. (The Practice is very keen, though, being financially incentivised, on getting me to go along for the latest covid jab, an invitation I am ignoring!) If I considered myself in genuine need of medical attention, absent availability of advice from one of the doctors in the family, I would either drive myself to the nearest A & E (10 miles along a notoriously congested road) or summon an ambulance. Although given the conditions on said road, plus the time-consuming priority apparently now given by initial phone responders to the chosen “pronouns” of anyone summoning emergency medical aid, I’d probably be dead before assistance arrived. A now retired midwife in the family speaks sadly – and often bitterly too – of the changes in the practise of her profession over the years, from caring one-to-one supporter and comforter of the labouring and delivering mother, to record-keeping, screen tapping obsessive, rushing sometimes between 4 or 5 rooms, each containing a labouring, often terrified, mother. No. The NHS is no longer fit for purpose. I am old enough to remember its inception in 1948, a couple of months before my youngest sibling was born, and how it made medical care available to all. (In fact, though, many very modest upper working class families on very moderate incomes, such as that of my parents, had some sort of insurance which paid for a GP and, I believe medicines. Our GP came to our house several times in 1944, when I had measles badly, and on a few other occasions to see a sick sibling.) When I married, my family benefitted from access to a first-rate General Practice throughout my offsprings’ childhoods. Now a GP is a rapidly vanishing species. I have a dental appointment for next week, the replacement of a filling which fell out recently. Private appointment of course. A small matter of, I anticipate, around £500, but worth it to me because I have always dreaded needing false teeth. Impossible, however, for a large proportion of the population who are, I understand, in desperation extracting their own teeth with pliers! As for the DIE wastes of space and money, my thoughts are inexpressible on a public forum. We need a Party with the courage to re-invent a health care system fit for the 21st century, not just tinker around the edges of the existing. We need to take account of the fact that in 1948 there were no joint replacements, no treatment for that “old lady’s affliction”, the hip fracture. (The patient lay in bed for a few weeks, in agony, then died of pneumonia.) There were no organ transplants, no cataract operations, no infertility treatments. Cancer treatment was brutal and rarely effective anyway. Antibiotics were in their infancy. Women not infrequently chose to have all their teeth extracted before marriage, in order to save their husbands money, since each pregnancy was reckoned to lead to dental problems. The advances in medicine over the past 8 decades have resulted in survival where previously death would have supervened. We get ill, we are effectively treated, so we live to become ill again, thus needing more treatment and surgery. As a nation, we have to realise that as our expectations rise, so does the cost, so we must be prepared to pay more for our medical and surgical needs. What we should NOT, though, be paying for, what should NOT be gobbling up great wadges of cash, is all this DIE nonsense.
Socialists realised that revolutions don’t work so they adopted another approach. Destroy everything that does work. The Labour Party knew what it was doing when it effectively stole the existing hospitals and called it the NHS. It does not work for anybody, patients, staff and even those who do not want to use it because they still have to pay for it. The NHS is the vehicle used to spread a socialist agenda into every other areas of life, particularly schools. The propaganda has to start early. Even worse is that other parties cannot compete against “free” services and so they all end up as socialists to some degree and British politicians are well down the path to poverty for all of us.
It seems likely to me that the Lucy Letby trial is a miscarriage of justice. There is another article today on Principia Scientific about the quality of the expert witnesses. Just like climate change we could have another example of bad science. Simon Webb pointed out that it is the first murder case in British legal history, including other baby murders, where the victims have not been named. I can’t see how that influenced the outcome but another odd aspect of it.
I was encouraged by Vivek Ramaswamy saying that the climate agenda was a hoax in his speech at the Milwaukee convention. The reaction from the crowd however showed no support for it. The propaganda is working well wherever we look.
The NHS is beyond help and absolutely should be demolished and rebuilt from the bottom. However we cannot do this given the ever lengthening waiting lists and people in need of medical help.
What I would do is get rid of every last one of these DIE/ESG people overnight. They are clearly not part of the solution and must therefore be part of the problem! And as you quite rightly point out they’ve now taken to empire building. Why can’t TPTB see that? The NHS clearly has far too much money if they can afford to spend it on obscene salaries for fatuous non jobs. Get rid and get back to your core business!
And get Stonewall the hell out of there too.
Well said Carolyn. I guess the issue is whether or not this DIE and ESG nonsense has gone so far that it cannot be once and forever seen off to where it rightly belongs, or whether we are cursed with it for the indefinite future. I fear the latter. Unfortunately every institution in the UK is now riddled with it. According to GNNews yesterday evening, even banks when deciding where to invest OUR cash, are prioritizing this idiocy over profits. As for the NHS, one could scarcely find a more ethnically diverse staff in any organisation. NHS employees work together as a team, for the benefit of the patients, irrespective of their own or the patients’ ethnic origins. Clinical staff are, I am sure, as frustrated by all the current woke nonsense as are readers of this blog. (There will always be a few self-seeking trouble-stirrers on the make, but these are to be found in every organisation, small or large.)
I heard this morning from a female doctor about to embark on her third post-qualification year, meaning that she has chosen the area of medicine in which she intends to specialise for the remainder of her professional life – approximately the next 30 years – and in which, with luck and a following wind she stands a chance of becoming a Consultant by her mid-forties. But for the time being, from next month, she will, once again, be relatively speaking a novice, receiving guidance, advice and assistance while being also no doubt the general “dog’s body” of the specialist team, the one who runs around chasing up test results, the one who arrives first on shift and leaves last and frequently stays on well beyond the end of the shift. All this is fine. It’s what doctors at the start of their careers sign up for. What is NOT fine is that this young and very attractive woman, by definition vulnerable when out on the streets alone at night BECAUSE she is a young and attractive woman, is unable to obtain a permit to park her car in the hospital where she will be working, meaning she will have either to use the local Park & Ride system, which stops mid-evening, to get to the hospital, or when she knows she will be working into the night go by car and hope to find an on-street parking slot not too far away and hopefully in a reasonably well-lit and respectable residential area so that she will not feel too vulnerable when walking from the hospital back to her car around mid-night. For obvious reasons I am not saying where in the UK this young woman will be working, other than to say it is a moderate-size town, not London. What applies to this young woman undoubtedly applies equally to hundreds more young doctors, both female and male, whom the NHS system works into the ground in their junior years and for whom it cares not a jot in terms of their welfare or actual physical safety. I am enraged by this, although it’s not I whose safety will be imperilled. However, we should all be angered on behalf of these young doctors. And nurses too – same applies to them. And let us not forget that while these young UK trained doctors are being insulted and disregarded by the NHS system and its box-ticking “managers” – all of whom you can bet your life have on-site parking facilities! – very significant deductions are being taken from their not over-generous salaries in order to reimburse the Government for the £80,000 or so Tuition and Accommodation debts they incurred during their 5 years at medical school. They also face a series of professional exams, passing of which is mandatory for career progression – and also patient safety – and each exam costs entails costs to the candidate which frequently go into the £thousands. No wonder we are losing our young doctors to the Antipodes!
Good stuff Stillreading. Thanks for your informative comments. But surely you could get a private demist to give you a filling much cheaper than £500. It would probably be less expensive to fly to Turkey or Romania and have it done there, the flight and accommodation in a hotel included.
I would rather not risk it Marc Age. I may be lucky and the cost less, but since I have a choice I prefer to spend my savings on my teeth in preference to foreign holidays, costly cruises, restaurant meals, Sky Sports or Netflix etc. I have an excellent dentist whom I trust absolutely and have seen and heard sufficient of the experiences of friends and relations with less skilled dentists to make me disinclined to follow suit. It’s evident that we all – young people as well – have to accept that the era of free health care, dentistry included, is long gone. It’s a case of priorities, of which for me health comes top, although I do feel outrage on behalf of the many in the UK who can no longer access any NHS dental care but who just cannot afford to “go private”.so in desperation are extracting their teeth themselves with pliers. (I believe that our “small boat” guests are routinely provided with dental care gratis as soon as they arrive, but I intend not to think about that too much at the end of what has been a very enjoyable Bank Holiday Monday!)
Thanks for that Stillreading. You comments and Thorpe’s are always worth reading. A filling on the NHS is Band 2 dental treatment: £70.70.