The NH mess

[Naselus]

I've recently moved to a new contract with the NHS, and frankly, I think I ought to share a few of the details. The entire thing is scandalous.

My new post involves sitting in a room full of servers for four hours a day. I need to get up and change tapes three or four times in those four hours. This is the sum total of my job. However, and believe me, this is just the start of the issues I have with this, the Head of IT in MRI thinks that there should be THREE people employed in this activity.

I'm paid £9 an hour for this, and I assume that the other contractors are too. This means that, for twenty hours work a week, I'm getting nearly £10,000 a year, as are two other people. For a job that requires one person at most, and could in fact be almost entirely automated for around £5,000.

£30,000 of tax money is being vomitted into the pockets of contractors such as myself (and as I'm subcontracted, presumably the total is actually somewhat higher), for doing what basically amounts to a completely needless job. As a second-line DTS engineer, I could entirely automate the job myself for around six months worth of my pay. Not that I'm authorised to do so.

There are no spare tapes to replace the damaged ones. There's no budget to buy any more. There's no-where that even makes some of the types we need. The entire network could be backed up entirely onto 4 Ultrium 3 tape cartridges, automatically, every night. All that is required is the £30,000 to upgrade the software and buy the tape library. However, the NHS feels it's a better idea to use the £30,000 to hire three expensive contractors to sit in a room doing nothing for four hours a day, and continue using a bizarre hodge-podge of random tape types.

Frankly, I'm not suprised the NHS is going bankrupt with management like this. The Head of IT is more worried about us filling out three seperate time sheets than actually, you know, doing any work worth the large price tag our jobs have. Why the hell are there three of us? Why have I got a job that pays as much as my last post did per hour, for doing a fraction of my old job? And why the hell is this being allowed to continue?

[modeski]

Don't knock it while you've got it, mate. A friend of mine recently left an IT post with the NHS, where his job consisted mainly of upgrading computers to XP, and supporting a variety of system that had every operating system from Windows 3.1 to XP, with some OS/2 thrown in for good measure. The beautiful part is, he used to be a cleaner at the hospital.

From what he told me, there is no central IT strategy, as none of the high-ups can tell arse from elbow, let alone consider the merits of a cogent backup system. Consider yourself and the three other tech goons as the war profiteers of the NHS' Iraq. Enjoy the pork, fill out the forms and maintain the aura of sensibility that is near breaking-point.

[Naselus]

Hey, I know I'm getting a ridiculously good deal out of this, but I also know that the £100 a week I used to pay in tax and N/I could be a hell of a lot less without stupidity like this. I am, frankly, insulted by my own job. It offends me that my boss has an IQ somewhat lower than his own easy chair.

Take the PC I've been given. I use it, for the most part, to surf the net and play PC games. It's an £800 HP model, of the kind I used to recommend for the hi-tech equipment at my old job. I could, in theory, do my entire job on a P2 500, but they've instead bought us three 2.4gig top-of-the-line HP models. Go figure.

[TheCritique]

Virtually every Government IT project I’ve heard of has been notoriously unsuccessful, and therefore poor procedures in such simple things as changing backup tapes is unsurprising in such bureaucratic organisations. It also confirms that there are too many non-jobs in the public sector.

Out of interest, does anyone have an idea of the ratio of administrators to actual medical staff in the NHS?

[Naselus]

There's 1.3 milliom staff in the NHS. 679,000 are medical staff, 465,000 are support staff. 106,000 are in 'central functions', 75,000 are in the murky area of 'hotel, property and estates', and 39,000 are managers.

[TheCritique]

If ‘support staff’ actually deal with patients, that means that 16.1% of NHS staff are administrators (otherwise, the ratio is 1:1 !).

[Naselus]

depends how you mean by 'deal with patients'. The support staff aren't administrators; they're drivers, engineers, janitors, technicians, receptionists, and other general support functions. These are the people who keep a hospital running; the doctors are the people it's running for, and the administrators are the people who make sure the people running it keep running it properly.

Also, 16.1% isn't too bad at all. The problem is that the management are incompetant. They look at short-term money saving initiatives without thinking about the bigger picture. It is cheaper to replace the staff with an automatic system, but only if you're keeping the staff for more than a year. As the staff are contractors, there's no need to admit you're keeping them that long; they're three-month contracts look much cheaper than the £10,000 overhaul required. So they keep vomitting money away pointlessly.