My time in the public sector
Being in the IT industry one hears stories about incompetence in the public sector, but I can assure you, none of them measure up to actually how incompetent the public sector really is.
My company and I recently completed a short contract for the NHS and spent my time working with the board of the trustees, the IT department and the department of Information. It was quite shocking how the staff at all levels of the organisation are primarily concerned with passing the buck and making life harder for others because of some petty gripe for procedure.
I sat in a meeting where one of the managers actually asked the team how he could make life harder for other members of staff who had not followed his protocols. Other members openly discussed innovative new ways of saying no to genuine requests for support.
The board itself, stated they didn’t care if what we were doing made life harder for staff, they just wanted the project done because they had inadvertently promised it to someone else.
We even had one example where a six month project, that produced nothing, was supposed to have produced a whole new set of reports. These reports it turns out were already being generated by other members of the manager’s team and the project that went wrong would only have duplicated work if it had actually worked.
The upshot is millions of pounds of tax payers money wasted on nothing.
It seems the NHS is being held together by a minority of very hard working people carrying the buck for the majority. These key individuals are not recognised for their hard work and incompetent members of staff are promoted over them. HR recommended about one employee who consistently failed to do what was asked of him, was lazy in his work and did not have the right skills to complete tasks assigned to him despite numerous training courses, to promote him up the ladder until he could not achieve his job. Surely this must be illegal?
My opinion of the NHS has swung back to privatisation. When I hear both parties calling for more funding for the NHS, I shriek in horror, as it is just more money wasted. The only way to save the NHS is to sack the whole lot of them and start again.
