30 Jan 2014

The sick truth about the great NHS redundancy racket


An extraordinary and scandalous scenario is being played out repeatedly in hospitals and health trusts across the country.

How countless health bosses are being lavishly paid off and then re-hired to do almost identical jobs 


Fat cats bank pay-offs provided from the public purse, take a holiday - the rules say at least four weeks - then dust off their business suits and apply for new positions in the health service... on big salariesFat cats bank pay-offs provided from the public purse (many are ‘eye-watering’ according to one insider), take a holiday — the rules say at least four weeks — then dust off their business suits and apply for new positions in the health service . . . on big salaries.
And in the Kafkaesque world of our once-revered NHS, this is done in the cause of saving money.
As part of the Government’s health reforms, intended to make £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2015, thousands of managers and staff employed by the old Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) were made redundant when those bodies were axed on April 1.
Fat cats bank pay-offs provided from the public purse, take a holiday - the rules say at least four weeks - then dust off their business suits and apply for new positions in the health service... on big salaries+4
Fat cats bank pay-offs provided from the public purse, take a holiday - the rules say at least four weeks - then dust off their business suits and apply for new positions in the health service... on big salaries
Yet many individuals are now being re-employed by recently formed organisations such as NHS England or the new Clinical Commissioning Groups.
There are said to be up to 7,000 vacancies still remaining in the new NHS structures.
Under the much-trumpeted reforms, one raft of bureaucratic bodies and quangos has simply been replaced by another — 171 bodies were abolished, 240 were created — taking on largely the same responsibilities.
Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie, a member of the Health Select Committee, says: ‘It’s managers’ jobs for mates again. The Government’s reforms were intended to put clinicians, not managers, at the heart of our NHS.
‘The reforms were not brought in to give PCT and SHA officials a lucrative thank-you-and-goodbye pay-off, and then give them a brand new big-salary desk-job under a different name. It is a scandal if NHS management is persisting in providing jobs for their buddies.
The great NHS merry-go-round: Health service spends £430m on pay-offs for sacked bosses... only for 1 in 5 to rejoin the NHS!
Retired nurse, 58, died in agony after NHS Direct refused to send ambulance because the 'computer said no'
'NHS is extremely bad at getting rid of people': Thousands of untrained carers are putting patients' lives at risk, report warns
‘We need a complete clear-out of the tainted NHS management elite, and it should start at the top with Chief Executive of NHS England, David Nicholson. We have to clamp down on this robustly and put an end to NHS managers giving each other nice jobs.’
According to a report by the National Audit Office yesterday, since 2010, the NHS has spent £435 million on redundancy packages for staff of departments scrapped by the reforms, but more than a fifth of those have already found new jobs within the health service.
In March, it was revealed, in response to an MP’s question, that at least 2,200 NHS staff — mostly bureaucrats — have been re-employed by trusts after taking compulsory or voluntary redundancy between May 2010 and September 2012.
One manager says: ‘You go to someone’s leaving do, then a few weeks later you find they’re back. It’s happened a lot.’
And it makes a nonsense of the enormous redundancy pay-offs.
Sir Neil McKay, the chief executive of Midlands And East Strategic Health Authority, reportedly received a package worth £465,000+4
Sir Neil McKay, the chief executive of Midlands And East Strategic Health Authority, reportedly received a package worth £465,000
In the current round of revolving doors, some NHS employees are being granted more than £450,000 in severance money. Thousands are in line for six-figure sums..............

I wonder how much the SHA and the PCT staff got here and how many are now working for new named posts.

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