Comment on NHS management is a bullying, incompetent cult
HeartyBeast@kbin.social 10 months agoI'm married to a doctor, who subsequently went into NHS management. My impression of NHS management (and I've worked in both private and public sector) is that the default position is to bend over backwards to do the right thing. Certainly, I've seen worse behaviour in private sector management than I have in the NHS. What makes yoiu think differently?
JaffnaCakes@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Based on my experiences (13 years, 3 Trust’s) the managers fell into two broad groups. The first were amazing, well established in their profession and worked their way up through the ranks. They cared for their team, had professional pride and enabled everybody to do the best job possible (it was actually one of these people who sent me the article). The second group were as the article describes. Invariably not very good at their core role so moved towards management and admin to escape it, invariably failed upwards, made poor decisions which they weren’t around long enough to see the impact of, and were insecure in their position so responded poorly to any challenge.
HeartyBeast@kbin.social 10 months ago
But in this situation, it wasn't the managers who were challenged, in particular. From what I can see A group of doctors put in a complaint about Letby. Letby then played the system by putting in a bullying complaint that the system then had to investigate.
I have no doubt that these managers were incompetent and defensive - I suspect heads should roll. But the headline charge of 'bullying' seems a bit off. It's a weird story and I'm looking forward to the results of the enquiry
JaffnaCakes@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Absolutely, for me I think the link is the line "many bully to hide their incompetence ". The best managers accept that sometimes problems arise and mistakes happen (or in the worst case someone acts maliciously), and they take the short term aggro or reputational damage to improve the long term outcome. The bad managers are the exact opposite, they don’t want to deal with the short term problem and will actively bury it regardless of the long term risk to patients. I think that is what has happened here, and sadly often the next step (in my experience) is bullying those subversive elements.