Quote:
|
I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, but let's just not smear all managers, please.
|
To be quite clear, what I'm getting at is the management culture that you only have to have the right person at the top and things work*, which is actually a faith (in that there's no explanation of how it's supposed to work or how you check it's working, because to do either of those displays lack of faith). I also see this as part of the way the NHS has been treated over the last ten years, which seems to be based on a view that increasing the number of managers and the amount spent on them automatically increases the quality of the service, which is also a faith-based position. In the real world, it just costs more and leads to bizarre outcomes, because what actually matters in the real world is the structure of incentives and rewards that emerges, which no one ever actually assesses until it's too late.
As you say, it could be that if she goes to law about it, she might have a good case that her decisions were perfectly sound when taken in the context of what her employers were expecting of her in running the trust. However, if that is the case, and they led to increased deaths from the hospital being dirty, surely she bears some blame along with the DoH? If you were faced with a management decision to save lives or please Patricia Hewitt, what would you do?
* as in ghastly programmes like 'The Apprentice' and 'Dragon's Den', which encourage this form of faith. Ironically Alan Sugar is singularly immune to the faith-based management approach, which I suspect is where the show's tension comes from, as it gives him ample scope for applying the cluebat of reality. This makes excellent TV.