I had a relatively quiet week at work, off the wards, so tackled my to-do list. It’s a long list. I chose my least favourite task, writing the ward rota for the Respiratory Consultants. Why is a Consultant doing this tedious task, you may ask? This is a symptom of more than a decade of underinvestment in the NHS and the false economy of cuts, and more cuts, to a dwindling admin support team, resulting in more and more tasks being piled onto the clinical workforce. It would have been unthinkable to expect a Consultant to write a rota ten years ago. From a public and organisational perspective, it makes no sense to have employees who are paid well for their expertise and experience, performing admin tasks. Whilst I wrestle with excel spreadsheets, and attempt to solve hierarchical constraints problems, I am not delivering or improving patient care. Not only this, an undervaluing of admin in the NHS has led to low staff retention and poor patient experience. False economy is a feature of the modern NHS. Next time a politician talks about ‘cutting backroom staff’, remember that the work of the backroom does not go away, it just lands on the desk of the front line staff.
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