E54, I spent 9 months with the NHS a couple of years back as the Maintenance Manager for a large NHS Trust, the reason apprentices do not do anything more than described is due to stupid Union rules and the health and Safety mentality of the morons who run these places.
Let me give you an example of how things were where I was.
- 84 Staff, technicians, engineers, electrical, mechanical, doors, fabric, secretaries, help desk bla bla bla
- 17 staff older than 70 years
- 23 staff off "sick" - long term (Full pay inc' O/T allowance based on previous 12 month average - which was a lie!)
- Call out payments for staff who never did call out
- 4 Apprentices who were not allowed to work on anything "operationally critical", thus they got stuck with lamp changes in corridors only
- 4521 outstanding Electrical maintenance reactive tasks
- 788 outstanding mechanical maintenance reactive tasks
- 1021 outstanding fabric tasks
- PPM records that were a bloody lie as some of the kit supposedly maintained had been out of action or removed for decades in some cases and the rest clearly had not been maintained
And this was the tip of the iceberg. I began to sort this out, forced out the +70 year old staff because we were paying in excess of £30K a year for each one, due to longevity of service, and yet they did no work at all, they all sat in the Maintenance Canteen all day watching video's, reading etc, and in 3 cases they turned up, signed in, went home and then someone would sign them out. The reason being, the Union had negotiated a deal that those above the age of 68 yrs were not allowed to work in the Trust's buildings!!
The NHS is the most corrupt and wasteful resource in the public arena, personally I would privatise the whole damn thing and save the nation tens of billions and get back genuine accountability (retain the idea of healthcare free at point of use though).
I resigned after 9 months when all attempts to modernise the department started to clash with the Projects team, 5 people sat in an office and they organised and ran all construction related projects from £1000 to £10 million, and all bare one were former Nurses with no engineering background at all, the one who was not a nurse was a former Painter and decorator. These clowns were costing the trust millions every year and no-one cared.
My Director, who started 3 months prior to me, quit the following day (after I quit) because he too had enough of the inept attitude, complacent nature and sheer stupidity of the NHS system...he has gone back to running the maintenance nationally for a commercial bank...on about 5 times the salary too!!
