The night night sky was ablaze.
The inferno belched smoke and ashes into the air. People ran for their lives. Their homes burned quickly. The fire spread north, fanned by high winds.
Three of Rome’s 14 districts were completely wiped out; only four were untouched by the tremendous conflagration.
Hundreds of people died in the fire. Many thousands were left homeless.
It was July 18th, AD 64. The Great Fire of Rome. Begun in the slums of a district south of the legendary Palatine Hill.
Emperor Nero fiddled while the city burned.
Actually, it’s apocryphal. He didn’t.
He wasn’t in Rome and the violin was yet to be invented. Never mind…
… if there is a latter-day Nero, someone fiddling whilst the city burned…
… someone in charge whilst things around him were falling apart…
… someone preoccupied with trivial matters whilst important life and death matters are being played out…
… it has to be Steve (the Bully-Boy) Barclay.
No, he doesn’t play the fiddle, but he is preoccupied with the trivial whilst the NHS falls apart.
In the midst of the chaos, the strikes, the waiting, the excess deaths, the staff shortages, people leaving…
… Bully-Boy reaches not for a fiddle but a memo.
As if it is vital to the future of the NHS, will change the state of play, will answer our problems, demonstrate leadership or wisdom, he has demanded that ICS’s produce an organogram by the 6th January…
… a picture of what their part of the collapsing, over burdened NHS looks like.
Whilst the nurses continue their historic industrial action, instead of talking, B-B is fiddling, writing memos.
The HSJ has calculated; 2,542 people, who have waited, goodness knows how long, for an operation were told; ‘Sorry, we can’t help, there’s a strike’.
Another 13,317 good people had their outpatient appointment cancelled. Without a diagnosis, left wondering what it is that’s causing them pain, distress, impaired mobility… whatever.
The nurses strike again tomorrow.
Doubling the numbers abandoned, bringing the total to around 26,634 waiting for an outpatient appointment for a diagnosis, a scan, a test…
… and 5,084 waiting for an operation and to get their lives back.
Each of them wondering how they get a place back on the waiting list, already heading for 8 million.
In the meantime, B-B is sending for pictures of the NHS…
… presumably for some sort of reminiscence therapy, to remind him what the NHS is supposed to look like.
On Tuesday the paramedics join in the strikes.
The numbers tell me, 999 call handlers answer more than 100,000 calls a day.
Around 10% might be Category 1. Pray to the gods of Samaria, they’ll be picked up.
As for the rest? It very likely means, around 90,000 people will have to wait, walk, crawl, hitch-hike or get a taxi to hospital and join a queue in the car-park, because A&E is already chock-a-block.
… how many won’t make it in time? Dunno.
In the meantime B-B’s priority is hounding managers, who have one or two other things to do, with his daft-dead-line for nonsense, by the first week in January.
This is BB trying to look busy. He can’t solve the big problem so he will create some little ones, and look like he is fixing them.
Not for nothing he is called Bully-Boy.
Bullies, generally, are inadequate in some way…
… they don’t have the talent or the skills of the people around them, so they throw their weight around to get attention and let everyone know who’s in charge.
Looking at B-B’s CV, he worked in a staff organisation, went to Uni, qualified as a solicitor, did a gap year Commission in the army and pitched up in politics.
Nothing he has done, or studied, or learned, has prepared him to run the nation’s biggest organisation. He is out of his depth.
Nothing has prepared him for the industrial action he is now responsible for.
Nothing he knows will help him explain to over 100,000 people left waiting for an appointment or on the pavement… why they are there.
Nothing has equipped him for the delicate negotiations that are needed to bring this debacle to an end… which is why he won’t talk…
… because nothing has prepared him to know what to say.
Nothing will have given him the innovative, creative thinking, the nouse, the skill that he needs, now… to bring the NHS home, safe.
But, he will have some nice pictures.
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
