• Home
• What We Do
• Committee Members
• Member Benefits
• Health & Safety
• Education
• Pensions
• Branch Newsletters
• Secretary's Corner
• Contact us

 

The Staff Partnership Forum (SPF) that was held on Friday 4th June where the membership comprised;

Staffside expressed their views and concerns about the events relating to the 11th hour cancellation of the SAP course and the impact that their decision would have on subsequent courses in the very strongest of terms. We also expressed our dissatisfaction about the notable absence of any of the decision-makers when the news was broken to the students on the affected course, the inadequate level of communication, conflicting information and the overall manner in which these students had been treated.

Dr Chrispin did confirm that the decision to cancel the course was due to a combination of reasons and not isolated to the HPC accreditation concerns as indicated by Hayden Newton when he spoke to the Bedford-based students on the 28th May.

Jackie Robinson advised the management side that she had sent a briefing to the branch committee, county and local reps because they were being pressed for answers and apart from a letter to the affected staff there had been little else from the upper echelons of the Trust. Staffside highlighted that the absence of information always results in speculation and rumour which in itself leaves staff feeling isolated, alienated and increases the level of frustration amongst them. It is our view that communication is essential - even if only to say that there is nothing new to report and we requested that they send out a Trust-wide bulletin detailing the reasons why the course was cancelled and the subsequent ones would be delayed!

Jackie Robinson has written an article for the latest Branch newsletter/website, although this will inevitably be “out-dated” by the time it reaches the various sites and workplaces owing to developments that had occurred during the intervening period. In response to this, and tied in with my confirming that a number of the students from the cancelled course were in the process of compiling a collective grievance,  one of the management team expressed the view that our communications and active support of this action were inflammatory and unhelpful.

A commitment was given by the Trust that they will make every attempt to resolve the issues in a timely and appropriate manner. This commitment includes the establishment of a team lead by Suffolk General Manager Marcus Bailey whose job it will be to review of the current provision of education and training within the organisation. This review will be undertaken in partnership with Barry Jarvis and myself representing the staffside.

For his part, Marcus Bailey has started the ball rolling already by sending out a letter to every individual student from the suspended, full time and modular courses and each letter will be accompanied by a short questionnaire that we would encourage all students to complete and return.

The questionnaire is one of three initiatives that he has devised as a means of involving/engaging the students in this review, the other two being a dedicated e-mail address trainingreview@eastamb.nhs.uk and a “drop-in” session to be held at each of the three training centres as set out below

The aim of these consultation tools is to encourage students to share any issues, thoughts and suggestions and whilst we completely understand that a number of students may well think “why bother”, we don’t know how else the review team will be able to gather a genuine and first-hand consensus of opinion if those affected do not actively participate?

We also appreciate that most, if not all of the students will quite rightly say that they’ve been raising these issues/concerns for some considerable time with nothing being done about them so why will this be any different? Staffside agree with these sentiments entirely, however in order to get it right there first needs to be a clear understanding of what is actually wrong and as such we have decided to take a small leap of faith and will be supporting Marcus Bailey and his team in a bid to achieve this for the sake of all current and future students working in this organisation.  

 

Return to homepage