UK: Cut Managers, Not Nurses

My facility froze wages and has been cutting support staff. My manager gets phone calls directly from administration about OT............a single hours worth of OT.

Recently, it was announced in yet another "Workers need to realize the situation the economy has put us in and work harder/smarter" pep talk (sarcasm here) it was announced that a company was being brought in to "analyze where cuts could be made, how profits could be increased and how census can be returned to a more stable condition."

Here is my problem. I work at a mid sized suburban hospital, its selling point and the thing that set it apart from other facilities was its ability to personalize the care it offered. It, at least in the past anyway, managed to avoid treating its patients like numbers. It is a good facility, despite the one MAJOR FLAW it is afflicted with.

That flaw: This (remind you, I said this is a mid sized suburban hospital) facility has in its administrative staff TEN..............10...........Vice Presidents. How? You can under no circumstances justify such a grand amt. of money being spent on administrative salaries. There just is no excuse for such irresponsible spending/staffing. I can not stretch my mind far enough to believe there is any reason for two, much less 10 of these people.

To take it a step further, like I said, a company is coming in to hep make major decisions about the hospital's direction. Ahem...........OK, so, you have TEN (10......I have to keep saying it to convince myself it is true, and it is) VPs and they are not able to do this on their own? Is making decisions to guide the facility through choices on cuts, how to maximize profit and how to attract patients not the core responsibility of the administration? How, with such an over sized administration office do they not get the job done. Despite being well staffed five times over..........they have to pay out money to bring a company in to perform the role they should be filling. Unbelievable. Thats all I can say.

If that Consulting Company is worth 5 cents, its first recommendation will be to cut administrators. There are too many of them, and they don't get the job done. Its a pretty simple problem to solve. This obviously will not be their final decision/recommendation though. Instead, they will take a few housekeepers away, maybe extend nurse ratios by one or two, change the way we do benefits here or there. But, the root problem at the facility will go..............under the radar.....since they sign the paychecks for the consultants.
I would love to see this philosophy on how to run a company applied to other areas of the hospital. Dietary can't get the food out on time.......NO PROBLEM. Just hire a catering company to come in and do all the cooking, let the Deitary dept. take a break for awhile, make cuts elsewhere. Security not keeping the place safe.............hey, just go get a few security from the local rent a cop business and let them do it, give the current security staff a few years to figure things out. Nurses can't get their work done.......easy solution, get nurses elsewhere and let the current ones watch while it goes on.
I've truly lost a lot of respect for my facility.

Interesting how they can have a bunch of VPs with MBAs and they can't figure out how to budget properly.....buy hey, we can spend some $$$ to have a consulting firm to analyze how we can cut nursing staff/services!
go figure!:angryfire

Well, we say the same things in Canada.

Somehow it's always the front lines that suffer. We have a CEO who will get a 25% bonus if he cuts our budgets to "acceptable" levels. Which basically means he gets a bonus for the nurses, aides, RTs, PTs, etc. having increasingly heavy loads with reduced access to certain services. Must be lovely to be a manager.

So, it's just not the NHS that is going through this, have a look at what's happening to Alberta Health Services and look for information on Steven Duckett, aka "The Australian Slasher"

I must state that the last place I worked the management was voluntarily going home early so that our hours wouldn't be cut...so, not all hospitals are the same!

AMEN!!! I currently work on a unit of maybe 40 nurses or so. We have at this point, 6 or 7+ managers for all of those people. I'm sorry, but my military husband ran units of 100 people or more by himself.

I know it's not a perfect analogy, but why on earth do we need so many managers?? They just seem to sit in their back offices drinking coffee and going to lunch while us staff workhorses are on the floor, sweating it out.

NONE OF them ever offer to help. They are very quick to criticize, however.

It's almost laughable when they hire an "experienced" nurse, put her on the floor for about 10 minutes, and then 2 months later, she's been drafted into management and is running around doing some "appointed" project. Meanwhile, we staff folks are asked to pull extra shifts, work short, etc.

Really? In most places I've worked, management was salaried exempt. It wouldn't make any difference if they went home early or not.

The administrative staff has tripled at our hospital in the last 8 yrs.
I say cut more administrators & their yrly. bonus'.( while people giving pt. care do not even get cost of living wages.)
To be in middle mgt. these days can be a nightmare.
I appreciate our ED mgr...he was hired after working almost 2 decades on night shift.
(The other 5 in the past 11 yrs. have been freakin' nightmares...all hired from the outside, hospital paid to move them from out of state, etc, etc....)
He's aging before our very eyes....

My facility froze wages and has been cutting support staff. My manager gets phone calls directly from administration about OT............a single hours worth of OT.

Recently, it was announced in yet another "Workers need to realize the situation the economy has put us in and work harder/smarter" pep talk (sarcasm here) it was announced that a company was being brought in to "analyze where cuts could be made, how profits could be increased and how census can be returned to a more stable condition."

Here is my problem. I work at a mid sized suburban hospital, its selling point and the thing that set it apart from other facilities was its ability to personalize the care it offered. It, at least in the past anyway, managed to avoid treating its patients like numbers. It is a good facility, despite the one MAJOR FLAW it is afflicted with.

That flaw: This (remind you, I said this is a mid sized suburban hospital) facility has in its administrative staff TEN..............10...........Vice Presidents. How? You can under no circumstances justify such a grand amt. of money being spent on administrative salaries. There just is no excuse for such irresponsible spending/staffing. I can not stretch my mind far enough to believe there is any reason for two, much less 10 of these people.

To take it a step further, like I said, a company is coming in to hep make major decisions about the hospital's direction. Ahem...........OK, so, you have TEN (10......I have to keep saying it to convince myself it is true, and it is) VPs and they are not able to do this on their own? Is making decisions to guide the facility through choices on cuts, how to maximize profit and how to attract patients not the core responsibility of the administration? How, with such an over sized administration office do they not get the job done. Despite being well staffed five times over..........they have to pay out money to bring a company in to perform the role they should be filling. Unbelievable. Thats all I can say.

If that Consulting Company is worth 5 cents, its first recommendation will be to cut administrators. There are too many of them, and they don't get the job done. Its a pretty simple problem to solve. This obviously will not be their final decision/recommendation though. Instead, they will take a few housekeepers away, maybe extend nurse ratios by one or two, change the way we do benefits here or there. But, the root problem at the facility will go..............under the radar.....since they sign the paychecks for the consultants.
I would love to see this philosophy on how to run a company applied to other areas of the hospital. Dietary can't get the food out on time.......NO PROBLEM. Just hire a catering company to come in and do all the cooking, let the Deitary dept. take a break for awhile, make cuts elsewhere. Security not keeping the place safe.............hey, just go get a few security from the local rent a cop business and let them do it, give the current security staff a few years to figure things out. Nurses can't get their work done.......easy solution, get nurses elsewhere and let the current ones watch while it goes on.
I've truly lost a lot of respect for my facility.

I work for a 100 bed hospital. The first thing this hospital did when the economy started to take a down turn is to freeze Management and Sr Management salaries and eliminated Management and Sr Management bonuses. Our Sr Management team was decreased from 8 to 5. We cut out the day shift supervisor and the patient care managers took over that role, which increased the managers work, yet you often see Patient Care Managers on the floor helping out frontline staff. Just a reminder that not all hospitals are focused on cutting front line staff and keeping managers comfy.