Let’s get our hands on non doms’ surplus cash

We had another ‘talking-to’ by our chief executive this week. This was to brief us (again) on the dire financial situation.

In fact, however dire we thought it was, it’s worse. Much worse. Now it’s up to us to disseminate this information to everyone in our ‘patch’ whilst simultaneously maintaining good morale, and, while we’re at it, coming up with some bright ideas of how to get us out of this mess.

What about calling in some management consultants, I hear you ask? For some reason, this idea didn’t find favour with our finance director, who looks like a man having sleepless nights.

My idea to solve our financial crisis is as follows - with everything going on, you may have missed the fact that Lord Ashcroft of Belize has apparently been spared ‘tens of millions’ of pounds worth of income tax by his non dom status. Am I the only person to see this obvious solution? Simply getting the Tory Party chairman to pay a bit of income tax would fund the hospital for several years to come.

We can also while away long hours in theatre speculating about what on earth Lord Ashcroft does for a living to owe so much tax - does he in fact actually own Belize? Or, indeed, most of Central America?

Meanwhile, I note with resignation that while we are being told to consider whether replacing theatre staff is really necessary, the governance department is still recruiting to vacancies. At least I’ll be able to reassure staff that, should they have time to fill in any critical incident forms, there won’t be a shortage of people to carry out a detailed root cause analysis and risk assessment, and produce a 10 point action plan telling us what we’ve been doing wrong.

The other department whose members don’t need to worry about receiving a P45 anytime soon is the quality improvement department. Yes, we have a whole department of people entirely devoted to improving the quality of everything, but they appear to do this in secret - none of the front line staff I’ve asked knew of their existence, which shows you just how essential they are.

The only reason I know about them is because they keep pinching my staff - they have policy of ‘seconding’ people from front-line areas and sitting them in front of a computer for six months while their erstwhile colleagues have to manage without them, thus greatly improving patient care.

The staff feel not unreasonably aggrieved that while those bankers, ably aided and abetted by the government, got the public finances into this mess, we now seem to be the ones left to sort out the problem - as usual the poor old taxpayer and patients will be the ones to suffer. With an election looming, the public sector has been shielded from the affects of the recession so far but after the election that is going to change.

“What about all the talk of ring-fencing NHS funding?” asks our lead nurse. Good question. The only things ring fenced at the moment seem to be City bonuses and Tory peers’ bank balances.

Tags: Funding