Many readers may have been as bemused as I was by the comment from the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust that they will recruit new nurses from Spain and Ireland as “clinical staff do not necessarily want to live and work in Lincolnshire”.
If £7 million is available to recruit 200 nurses, why not use that to train local student nurses who would love to qualify and work in a local hospital, or is it simply that Spanish and Irish nurses are cheaper?
“Transparency” and “openness” are not the first words that come to mind when we hear pronouncements like this.
Former Grantham hospital consultant Mr L. N. Chakrabarti, and former ULH NHS Trust chairman David Bowles, both express concerns that decisions are taken to allocate money where it suits the politicians and their puppets – not to provide optimum benefit to local patients by retaining and developing excellent local facilities.
The regular compliments we read from patients about their care in Grantham Hospital surely contradict the criticism in the Keogh report about ULH Trust shortcomings in “patient experience” – so is Grantham going to be subsumed into a Trust-wide statistical exercise – and possibly set up as a scapegoat when more shuffling of numbers is demanded?
We all know where the bureaucrats’ political priorities are strategically; where their ethical priorities are, anatomically, is anyone’s guess.
Brian Bruce
Bourne Road
Colsterworth