You know things are serious when a summons arrives from the chief exec for a “pep” talk. The first part of the talk consists of the swine flu plan. Ten days ago we were told that we could expect 8% of the local population to be infected. In fact that estimate has turned out to be 50% too high - and the sum total of patients in our hospital afflicted with the virus is four.
The main problem, as expected, has been staff going off sick, mainly because anyone who’s even slightly ‘off colour’ gets sent home by OH with a box of Tamiflu and instructions to on no account return for at least 5 days. It’s tempting even for those with the strongest work ethic.
At least those of us left holding the fort can comfort ourselves with the thought that, even if our less robust colleagues weren’t feeling particularly ill already, they certainly will once they’ve started the anti-virals.
The second, and considerably longer, part of the talk concerned our ‘financial doom’ i.e. after next year we’re not going to have any money.
This is because of the following factors:
1. The DoH is broke because hardly anyone is paying taxes any more
2. This also means that the PCT will not have any money to commission work from us
3. Our hospital isn’t paid for yet and we have to start servicing the PFI loan.
Health service inflation (i.e. the cost of drugs, etc) is greater by a factor of two than normal retail price inflation.
So, basically, even if we survive the swine flu crisis, we’re screwed. To cap it all, the DoH has decided that we still have to keep to the 18 week elective surgery target because, apparently, the plans we originally drew up to achieve this target should have taken into account the possibility of an influenza pandemic and global financial meltdown occurring simultaneously. Oooops! Caught us out there, I’m afraid.
The gist of the CEO’s message was that in order not to fail our target, consultants would have to “pull together” - perhaps giving up leave and doing extra lists in SPA time in order to reduce our waiting list before the second wave of swine flu hits (this is scheduled in the dairies for September). So there we have it.
We have to work like dogs now to save the target and then in September we have to work like dogs again to save patients from swine flu. Meanwhile, our respected politicians, who dreamed up these targets, are enjoying relaxing breaks. I doubt whether there was a doctor in the room who wouldn’t pull out all the stops to save acutely sick patients. However, expecting similar superhuman efforts to save our 18 week target doesn’t really push the right buttons for me, especially given that most of our waiting list consists of bariatric patients.
Evidently it is now a ‘medical emergency’ for a patient to wait an extra couple of weeks for a bypass. Roll on September, at least we all know where we are with a simple old-fashioned pandemic.
