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Save money by all means: but don’t cut corners
MONEY, money, money – it makes the world go round at least at such state institutions as the National Health Service (NHS).
Hospital accountants just cannot stop crossing out items on the balance sheets.
It was this – however understandable – mania that drove Whittington Hospital executives to close down their in-house system of archiving precious data discs and handing it over to a private company, McKessons. (See page 1.)
They had worked out costs would be lowered this way.
The fact that the data contained extremely confidential personal records of 18,000 staff members employed by the hospital over the past seven years didn’t seem to worry Whittington.
Nor did they consider that they had successfully handled the data themselves for several years.
Savings, after all, must come first, decided Whittington.
The result – chaos. This week the Whittington admitted that a disc put in a tray for delivery by a courier to McKessons in Warwick had disappeared.
Has it got lost within the hospital? Whittington executives don’t know. Has it got lost in the post? Again, no one knows.
So far the disc cannot be found. And thousands of staff members are quite rightly anxious that fraudsters can now hack into their accounts.
The hospital has immediately suspended a staff member. But he/she appears to be low down in the pecking order.
Pressed by this newspaper the hospital could not satisfactorily this week explain the exact steps taken to ensure staff members knew the disc had to be put aside safely to be picked up by the courier.
Were they told in writing? Were they only told verbally? Here a mystery still persists.
Should blame only be levelled at the man or woman at the end of the line?
Hasn’t management got some degree of responsibility?
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a policy of cutting costs unless it is so badly thought through that it can lead to the mess Whittington executives and the thousands of victims now find themselves in.
WATCH your head when you walk past a lamp post bearing a lovely flower basket – it may come crashing down on your head. That fear isn’t shared by most sensible people. But it does cause deep anxiety at the Town Hall apparently.
So much so that on grounds of health and safety they want to remove the lovely baskets that adorn Gayton Road, Hampstead. Here’s another example of “elf and safety” gone mad! Town Hall officials should stop wasting their time – and taxpayers’ money – and apply their minds more constructively. |
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