The final report into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

public inquiry was published today, Wednesday 6th February 2013.

You can access the full report here: (Link)

I listened with interest to the slot on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on the new recruitment plans for the police service (Link).

The argument has obviously split around the matter of the need for fresh talent and the risk of having senior people in an operational organisation with no operational experience.

At first glance I tend to fall on the side of the doomsayers and for this I am aware that the charge of hypocrisy can be laid at my door. I am a former graduate of a ‘fast track’ scheme within an operational organisation. However, my path is slightly different to the direct entry being discussed for the police. I was already a serving member of the service with a number of year’s experience of the operational nature of the organisation before I entered the scheme. In this way I used the opportunity to accelerate my promotion and get the benefit of the career development opportunities available. However, during my time going through this process I met many candidates who were direct entry and saw first hand the risks associated with this recruitment strategy.

This Christmas brought a much needed break, coffee room chats with colleagues in the run up to the festive season have focussed on the theme of great tiredness, of the need to just have a break, frankly Christmas was almost incidental.

Several marathon sleeps later and it’s time to honour the traditions of reflection on the past year and focus on the challenges to come in 2013.

This year we have worked primarily in the Health sector. As predicted it has been a year of significant change, as the impact of the Health and Social Care Act becomes a reality, cuts, competition and the uncertainty of the full extent of the power that the new GP Commissioning Groups will wield in the health economy and how they will use it has seen  organisations move to ensure their focus on core business, efficiency, economy and value for money. This is borne out in system and structural change, and in many cases in TUPE transfer as the many and various organisations of the wider health economy unfreeze, change and refreeze, albeit as temporary as that re-frozen state may be.

I suppose if there is a lesson learnt this past year, it is that staff are getting to grips with the idea that change is a constant state. Whereas in the past the Public Sector has seen large scale “change programmes” with defined start and end dates and pre and post change states, the state of organisational change now seems almost perpetual. The main difference that staff are coming to terms with, that these changes more often than not have a  TUPE transfer as  a key feature of change. Public Sector as a lifelong workplace is no longer a certainty.

A conversation today has prompted these musings. It was the “cover your back with e-mail” conversation.  A colleague, increasingly worried about a situation that is brewing and will eventually blow its top, worried that they will be the one to take the blame, was advised by the other colleague to ensure that he kept every e-mail about his part in the situation, in particular the worries and warnings he has raised.

Here’s the thing, I know that at times the e-mail “conversation” will look more like a stream of consciousness, a rambling, indecisive, snatches of imagery and thoughts, than of instructions, actions and decisions.

Increasingly I see colleagues fretting over the amount of e-mail, spending large amounts of time catching up on e-mail, terrified that they have missed some really important nugget buried deep in the pile of other e-mail stuff.

Yesterday saw the eventual publication of the Beecroft report by the Government (Link) after the Telegraph leaked a copy earlier in the day. The leaked copy (Link) which would appear to be an earlier draft of the report, contains some elements not included in the official report. This has led to claims of political editing by opposition parties and groups and yet again the Government seem to be driven by events rather than driving the agenda themselves. Indeed, the Business Secretary, Vince Cable is not in full support of the report. His statement on the BIS website is clearly distancing himself and the department from the report (Link).

There is lots of negativity in the news right now, families facing the reality of public sector cuts, the risk of redundancy, uncertainty whether the private sector will really be able to pick up the shortfall in the employment market and now a double dip recession.

Many a wise person has already commented that the savings needed in the public sector should be conducted avoiding a non thinking “salami slice” approach.  Departments and other public bodies have been working hard these past two years to or more to deliver required savings without impacting service users. I have written here myself about the terrible and difficult choices having to be made in Prisons and Health as just a couple of examples.

We know that times  are tough, we get told about it at least five times a day, so it is interesting that now is the time that a number of Trade Unions choose to call for action , including strike action in relation to pay and pension claims.

After dropping my son at school this morning, I popped into one of my local ‘Big 4’ supermarkets to pick up a few items.

As I wandered around the aisles I came across the store manager and a senior regional manager discussing how things were going.

The store manager was quite up beat in his assessment and was commenting that “despite the current climate, things are going well and I’ve got a happy staff group.”

I have been mulling on the issue of leadership in organisations over the past couple of days, not least because more and more it seems,  leadership qualities  is increasingly identified as the missing magical “something” that organisations are using to differentiate  their workforce. They are using the description of these seemingly mystical behaviours to a) describe the next layer of performance that high performers should be aspiring to, and therefore also all those operating beneath them if they want to be successful, but also b) to sort the wheat from the chaff, in a time of extreme cuts it is being used in organisations as a means of identifying those who no longer fit; redundancy criteria.

This is an important observation in both categories a and b, after years of talking about and getting people to focus on performance at work (I’m thinking in particular about the Public  Sector here) and finally getting it, now it seems something altogether different is required.

I was really disappointed to hear reported in the news this weekend that the Chancellor has a plan to move away from National Pay rates for Public Sector workers: (Link)

My disappointment comes in several forms, firstly that we are living with apparently our first generation “professional” politicians, many of the people in power and in the key opposition positions have never done anything else, stints as SPADs don’t count. With this career history in mind it is my (probably naive) expectation that irrespective of party political persuasion, they are well versed  in the detail of  the history of previous administrations of the 20^th Century. Here’s the second big disappointment, the announcement this morning tells me that there really are no new ideas,  not even in this professionalised group of people. We have been here before. 

Ideas of regional variation have been floated before. It was dealt with by Local Pay Allowances, where certain locations attracted a pay addition that differentiated the National rate.

The government is launching a scheme whereby employers will receive a fee for providing ex-offenders with employment opportunities and then keeping them on for two years or more. (Link)

This will come as welcome news to many in the criminal justice sector, as employment and sustained employment is one of the major hurdles offenders face upon release from prison.

One thing that I truly hope the scheme will provide though is a wide range of employment opportunities for the offenders. Whilst it is true that there are many unskilled and poorly educated men and women within our prison system, this is not true of the total population.