Wednesday, September 26, 2007

"You're being stabbed? Please hold whilst I check the manual"

Yesterday, Alan Johnson announced that there was going to be £97m funding to help tackle violence and abuse against NHS staff. Apparently "lone NHS workers" will be given devices that "will help locate users and link to a trained individual, who can summon help if needed." There will also be money spent on "training in personal safety, conflict resolution and dealing with verbal abuse for all NHS staff who need it."

Clearly this is an emotive subject, someone who is physically attacked - whether an NHS worker or not - should clearly be protected by the law. But I find myself wondering about the practicalities of this specific spending for some reason, although I readily admit I'm probably being shamelessly cynical.

For a start, what is a "lone NHS worker"? My guess is this is probably going to be a health visitor, a district nurse looking after the elderly, maybe a lone paramedic? What use is a special alarm presumably with GPS going to be for one of these people if they are in the middle of the Cumbrian pikes or the middle of the countryside in general?

Even if they're in a city the response time for an emergency is likely to be so long it's too late. This is especially the case if you first have to raise the alarm, go through to a call centre, which then decides whether you're being beaten up enough to warrant attention. And then there's this "abuse" angle.

What constitutes abuse that deserves to have attention? Will there be a list of swear words that define whether or not the abuse is strong enough? "Oh I'm sorry, she only called you a cow. If you could perhaps provoke her into calling you a twat then we can send SO19 around straight away to take the granny down." You get my drift.

Obviously that won't happen though because they're going to be taught "personal safety", which I guess will be either "run like you're being chased by a tiger" or "Welcome to to the DoJO". Having said that, wouldn't both those things go against the training in "conflict resolution", which, rumour has it, will be carried out by Liverpuddlian's with perms telling people to "calm down".

Yes, yes, such large sums of money being spent on protecting NHS staff from violence and naughty words sounds laudable, but I simply can't see how it will stop it happening. Most of the lone NHS staff will have a mobile phone anyway, or maybe even a radio. If they press the "alarm" it's going to be for a serious emergency that will be dealt with after the fact in most cases anyway.

It's a terribly morbid thing to say, but I always remember a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs about nuclear war called "When the Wind Blows". The elderly couple in it follow the Government's advice and climb into two poatato sacks each (bottom and top half) not realising they're actually make-shift body bags. Spending money on a trackable alarm won't stop the violence, it will just tell them where to find the body - assuming they press it in time.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

As ever, an initiative that addresses the consequences and not the causes.

It's easy to deal with events as they happen, it's much harder and long term to tackle the causes - so NuLab doesn't bother as either it won't contribute to their short/medium term re-election prospects or the individual politicos will have left the scene by the time things are really bad. Hence the approaches to immigration, tax, PFI, pensions, blah, blah, blah....

Thank you, I feel much better for having got that out of my system.

Anonymous said...

Oh God. Thick of me, but I'd never realised they were make-shift body bags. As if that book isn't dark enough.

Rich Tee said...

...and carrying another electronic device makes them more of a target...

Anonymous said...

Typical NuLab shit. They won't provide enough parking space for hospital staff - at our big DGH, some staff are having to pay £25 a week to park at the icerink next door; there's a freeze on nurse/midwife recruitment; they can't keep the hospitals clean - but they can buy MORE GIZMOS!! Wonder whose got shares in the company that makes them?

JuliaM said...

"...I simply can't see how it will stop it happening. "

Well, nothing will ever stop it happening completely. You are dealing with human beings, after all.

What would help to reduce it is proper punishment of offenders, but since we can't seem to do that for anything these days, there's really no hope...

Ted Foan said...

A lot of this stuff spouted by Johnson is old news anyway - training of staff to deal with AVH issues (abuse, harassment and violence) has been going on for several years now and the provision of personal alarms has been commonplace too. Plus NHS Trusts have been prosecuting members of the Great British public who assault staff for number of years.

Just another example of Labour recycling old policy announcements and spinning to get the headlines. Mandelson's grid is still working.

PS: I am about to take early retirement from the NHS because I can't face another round of "no more reorganisations" again.