Gee it’s noble of you to worry about the bosses balance sheet, but overtime, casual arrangements, agency cover etc really should be priced into running a business or indeed a health service.
Put it this way - NSW Health is more than happy to have these kind of workforce problems solved by just having workers go unpaid (they had saved 250 mil on jr doctors, for a while there until it backfired) and let the workers squabble amongst themselves about who’s taking too much unpaid leave.
I would maybe suggest the issue stems from government funding rather than the people running hospitals that are pretty much told to keep on saving people’s lives, but they can’t spend a lot of money on it… While I guarantee there’s as many arsehole bosses in the private and public sector, there’s also plenty of half decent ones that are trying to make do with the budgets they’re given
Oh I assure you it’s both.
The problem with hospitals is that they promote clinicians into administrative roles. Especially in the case of nurses they’ll reach a stage where they don’t have an option to progress their careers, other than going up into admin roles. So they do it. It robs the org of the most experienced clinicians and it puts people in charge that have neither the skillset, qualification or often even the inclination to do the role.
Senior hospital specialists occupy all your most senior executive roles too. Unqualified egomaniacs at best, petty vengeful twerps more often and outright corrupt in some instances.
I could tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end.
Isn’t there a sort of requirement though to have hospitals run by people that know what they’re talking about? My previous role in a previous company was PFAS related. We had 2 instances where managers came with zero experience and you could tell. Expected efficiency in a lab is 80% however we weren’t even getting 50% out of our instruments. Unfortunately we’d tried everything, our team was one of the top teams globally in analysis and we couldn’t get the work out faster. The new managers threatened to fire everyone both times, as they had no understanding of how the work was carried out. I would assume you’d need people with a high degree of technical expertise otherwise you would have
A: Really really bad decisions that stemmed from a lack of understanding of the teams they were managing
B: Really really bad decisions that stemmed from the teams they were managing exploiting the decision makers.
I definitely can see your point and appreciate the fact that most scientists make REALLY bad managers. But that would stem from a really poor promotion/management process in identifying management talent rather than technical talent.
The truth is that effective management, regardless of industry needs 3 skill sets.
1 - A suitable understanding of operational reality in relation to the managed capability, usually facilitated through doing the ‘delivery’ job.
2 - Management Skill across budget, manpower, people management, governance, delegation, risk management, conflict managment and a dozen other skills, usually facilitated by bugger all, at best a graduate programme with a few courses on ‘management’
3 - The ability to solicit, absorb, assess and act on subject matter expertise, utterly dependent on personality. This is the secret sauce that can mitigate a lack of 1 effectively.
For Items 1 & 2 people are usually fish out of water one way or the other, either they’re delivery people with no management training or managers with no delivery training
Item 3 is a wildcard, its a personality trait and while it can be mimicked, it’s woefully ineffective unless its for real.
Companies constantly do this to themselves because they do not train their managers properly in whatever skills it is that they lack because they do not recognise the value of those skills in that situation.
Train your techs on management BEFORE GIVING THEM A MANAGEMENT ROLE
Train your managers on the delivery component of their role BEFORE PUTTING THEM IN CHARGE OF IT.
PICK PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO USE SME’s.
Yes. No. Maybe.
My background is in FMCG and light manufacturing. I’m now in a heavy industry role.
My skills don’t change because I’m purchasing m24x120mm bolts instead of coca cola, chips or cardboard boxes. My knowledge of how things are used is poor, but that can be improved. I spent 5 odd minutes with a guy today, learning about what he does because he asked me to get him a couple of 46mm impact sockets.
And this point of Jubal’s is how you go about things.
She’s being fully paid whilst off sick.
The way their system works, is if you have a period of sickness under 7 days, you don’t need a doctors note. If over 7 days, you need a doctors note and if the period of sickness is under 28 days, they will continue getting full pay. All her periods of sickness so far have either been 7 days so she doesn’t need a doctors note, or she has got a doctors note signing her off for 28 days.
They are allowed 5 episodes of sickness in a 6 month period before it gets escalated. An episode of sickness still only counts as 1 if it is 1 day or 28 days. The first escalation, which she has triggered is literally just a meeting with her managers to see how they can support her to come back to work and if they can make any adjustments to help etc.
This particular girl is now on her 7th episode of sickness in 6 months (2 in her previous role), but she’s not even had her first meeting because she keeps calling in sick for when it is pencilled in. The system probably works well in 99% of cases, but in this case it’s not. Because she hasn’t had the meeting yet, those 2 extra episodes won’t count towards the next disciplinary step.
As Higdawg said, the main issue is she’s taking up a vital staffing spot for a highly qualified nurse, if she’s off with long term illness, they can’t just hire someone to cover her, so each shift they are either down on numbers, putting more pressure on the overworked colleagues, or they need to hire agency staff to fill the gaps, which cost approximately £600-700 per shift, that’s around £20-25k in extra budget to fill the shifts she’s missed.
Those agency staff are not able to give IV’s, Chemo etc to patients, so the staff are picking up more workload and getting paid less than that agency nurse, which causes more problems. The agency nurse most of the time, would never have worked with cancer patients, let alone paediatric ones and would get around £300 for the shift with the agency pocketing the rest.
It’s a shame because the girl they hired on paper is highly qualified, chemo and bone marrow transplant trained and interviewed really well, so they thought they were getting a vital new senior member of staff.
Normally it is 6 months for this type of position, but she has moved internally from another Ward in the hospital so it doesn’t apply to internal moves.
honestly feels like she’s gaming the system for her own sake. Free money, zero downside
That’s amazing. 
Hospitals go one of two ways with their administration.
Either career administration who have no idea how a ward works or nurses that have been in management for so long that Florence Nightingale was still around and they have no idea how things work anymore.
Haha sounds exactly the same over here too.
This is the number one thing that professional “management” types are lacking in my experience. Far too often they place no value on institutional knowledge, SMEs, differing view points, and any consideration outside than the bottom line here and now. Big four types infesting businesses and organisations with the attitude that business school and consultancy is the answer to every question. Then when the shit hits the fan it’s off to the next contract or to a new job from one of the boys.
The best managers (people, project, programme - whatever) I know and have known are those who trust their people to get shit done and listen when they give warnings. They’re always more about co-ordination, collaboration, and information sharing than control.
We have a new manager. And admittedly, I’ve only been here since Easter. But new boss seems to be struggling with the concept that even if the generation of reports is streamlined we still need to go through them line by line simply because lead times are not utilised by our system.
And we will always have work in the system far in advance of the lead time requirements. I’m quite happy to purchase to the work in the system instead of lead times. Not sure how the CFO feels about us tying up shit loads of cash in stock we don’t need for months thou …
Without her side of the story, it is presumptious to judge. At the end of 2023 my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She’s from Yorkeshire (stubborn as) so treatment was off the table. Problem was, she was the primary carer for my semi-demented dad. I would have taken carers leave if I thought she would accept help. Anyway, after a couple of visits to hospital, she died a fucking horrible death at the end of May. It rocked my dad. I was driving to Sydney (from Newie) every 2nd or 3rd day to help him. Two weeks after Mum’s funeral, he fucking died, and I found him dead in a oile of vomit.
So how much leave am I entitled to?
Technically, what your contract of employment says. It’s usually 2 days for bereavement.
Horses for courses. After benefits are exhausted, I’m happy to give unpaid leave for as long as someone needs it.
It shits me to tears when people chuck sickies without leave all over the calander. It’s very difficult to organise around and it effects profit.
I think we’ve all been around for long enough and worked in many different roles to know when someone is taking the piss or not.
This person, if they do have something big happening in the background, really should let their immediate boss or HR know because it is clear that whatever is happening isn’t sustainable from the hospital’s point of view.
They could even sit down and come to some sort of arrangement whereby they can have roster consistency.
If it was a long term employee whose performance or reliability drops it should be on their immediate manager to recognise this and ask them if everything is okay. It doesn’t have to be a formal conversation, do it over a coffee, but sometimes that is all it takes for the employee to open up.
I know all situations are different but I’d much prefer to have 2 or 3 people consistently show up for 1 shift per week rather than someone who does 75% of their rostered shifts.
That’s beyond rough, so sorry. 
I’d like to think a bit of commonsense would apply and your boss would be understanding. Obvious question but is your boss aware of this situation?
It’s about the only positive thing about defence at the moment.
They broke me so I’m at home until I’m fixed.
Took me 15 years to get medically downgraded for the first time.