I have to admit I’m finding work quite stressful at the moment - not the anaesthetics - I know what I’m doing (most of the time) and people are occasionally grateful, but my management role, where neither of the above applies.
As my husband says, I can leave the anaesthetics at work, but the management tends to come home with me. Luckily for my mental health, all our problems are about to be solved: the management consultants have been called in.
Our management consultants are called Andy and Dave. I spent most of Thursday sticking coloured post-it notes to the wall as part of a ‘mapping exercise’. Everyone gets together to talk through the ‘patient journey’ and identify where the problems lie and whose fault they are (the spinal surgeons’, since, as usual, they haven’t turned up to defend themselves).
So far Andy and Dave seem down-to-earth kind of guys, and to know what they’re talking about.
Not all management consultancies are like Andy and Dave - this week the top-notch consultancy McKinsey caused consternation by advising the NHS to solve its financial woes by cutting 10% of its staff.
Although it’s hard to believe that anyone who understands hospitals could propose this, it’s not really that surprising that a private consultancy which makes it’s money through market forces should propose a market-driven solution.
Downsizing the workforce is a traditional response from businesses facing a loss of profits and which have to make a surplus for shareholders. None of the other possible, non-market, solutions were mentioned such as canceling the £5bn ISTC programme (of which £1bn, give or take a few quid, has been wasted on paying for procedures that were never carried out), or stopping any more PFI deals (the total money raised so far by PFI is about £12bn, but the NHS will end up paying as much as £40bn in high interest rates and returns to shareholders).
It says a lot about the mindset at the DoH that this report was ever commissioned. Meanwhile, back in the real world, our guys are putting in plenty of groundwork. I have to admit it’s taken me a while to come to terms with Andy and Dave, because I’d previously believed that management consultants were a bunch of over-paid parasites who were only called in by incompetent managers.
That was before I became part of the theatre management team. Now I realise that they are in fact a valuable resource who are called in by desperate managers who are at their wits end because they have been ordered to achieve miracles with a bunch of unmanageable people, inadequate resources and a set of impossibly conflicting targets.
Dave and Andy’s remit is to help us treat more patients without any extra money or compromising safety, while making all the staff happy. So far we’ve had lots of post-it notes but no mention of market-forces or redundancies.
Let’s see if they can achieve in a few weeks what I have been trying to do for two years as clinical director - presumably not all management consultants are the same and I’m keeping an open mind.
Tags: Job losses, Management consultants
