Bedpan duty for civil servants

The Times Saturday 18 May 2013 has an interesting article by Jill Sherman, their Whitehall Editor. She reports that a scheme will start from next month for the top 200 senior civil servants at the Department of Health (later to be extended to all 2,000 civil servants in the department this year). Those who fail to do so will lose out on promotion.

Obviously they will not be undertaking work they are not trained for but will be expected to serve lunch in care homes, take over as receptionists in GP surgeries and carry out cleaning tasks in hospital.  This has come about as a result of the Francis Report into patient neglect at Mid Staffordshire Trust which recommended that health officials needed to connect more with personal contact with the patients.

For the civil servants it sounds to me to be rather a doddle because while they will be expected to carry out 4 weeks work a year, it can be split up, until eventually  they will have built up 6 months experience.
Of course splitting up the 4 weeks work in the NHS over a year does mean that these 'temporary' workers are not put through the stress and pressure which so many NHS workers encounter as they try to do their best for patients while attempting to keep to their own  high standards while working in understaffed and often difficult conditions.

While the article mentions Jeremy Hunt and Una O'Brien having already carried out such work there is no reference to the length of time they spent 'on the front line'.  It does say that Ms O'Brien spent a full shift with a matron in the A & E department of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham (is that all? that sounds like a doddle to me) and that Mr Hunt had worked as a porter pushing patients trolleys (for how long?)
This is all rather a bit of a 'jolly' for them really because there is a time limit before they return to their clean and comfortable offices, and then everything goes back to normal - for them that is - while as far as the real workers are concerned  it is a case of trying to get to work in crowded public transport and do the best in the time allotted to them.

Mr Hunt says this is necessary to understand more about what patients and the service users need and the issues which are important to them. I trust that the NHS staff they are working with for such a very short time will show them what hard work really means and give them the true picture of the understaffing situation and the pressures they work under, where every day feels as though they are walking backwards on a treadmill. It would also help if the workers knew these civil servants were being paid the same rate of pay as they are for the job they do!

And while we are on the subject of civil servants - I would suggest there are a number of other suggestions and decisions being made which could be  improved by asking these distant  decision makers to try working  in a children's nursery or a school for a month. It is so easy to read how well they are managing with things in other countries.