One of my proudest achievements during
2018 was reaching an important milestone that very few people in the UK reach.
I am a blood donor and I made my 75th donation of blood a couple of months ago.
According to 2015 research by NHS
Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) less than 3% of people living in the UK, who are
eligible to give blood, actually do so.
And of the 3% of people that do give
blood, only a tiny proportion manage to get up to their 75th donation. So getting
to this milestone is something that I am quite proud of.
So this morning I called the national blood
helpline to book my next appointment which is due any day from the 2nd of
January onwards. I was prompted to do this by an appeal they have put out in
the media stressing the importance of people donating blood during the festive
season when stocks become low. The image above is a screenshot from their
website which also emphasises this message.
And guess what? In the whole of
January they could only offer me one appointment time, on a day that was
unsuitable for me.
I don't live in a small village in the
middle of nowhere. I live close to the centre of Leeds, the fourth biggest city
in the UK. The Leeds blood donor centre is one of the biggest in the country.
Yet they are fully booked up until the first week of February.
The call centre agent tried to tie me
down to booking an appointment for a date in February, but I explained that
this was so far in advance that I didn't know whether I would be busy at work
that day - and therefore I could not commit to the appointment.
Obviously I'm delighted that they are
so booked-up that they don't need my blood. But it begs the question of why
they are still wasting large amounts of NHS money on advertising and marketing campaigns
appealing for people to give blood, but then when people call to make an
appointment to donate, they don't have any appointments available!
If anyone in the private sector is so
busy with work that they are unable to meet the demand, then the last thing
they would do is waste money on advertising and marketing! (And even if they
did waste money on advertising, I wouldn't be particularly bothered because
it's their own money that they are wasting!)
But what we are talking about here is
money that belongs to the National Health Service which is paid for out of the taxes
of the British people. Money that could be spent in other areas of the NHS.
But throughout the public sector, a
system of 'incremental budgeting' is used which means that around this time of
year there is a lot of "use it or lose it" money sloshing around the
system that people urgently want to spend, because they know that if they have
money left in their budgets on 31st March, then they will be awarded a smaller
budget next year.
And incidentally I do know what I'm
talking about because a few years ago I used to work for a government-funded
youth organisation as Head of Marketing.
Every year it was the same. The CEO of
the organisation would come to me in the spring telling me I urgently had to
spend money as quickly as possible so that we didn't get our budget cut the following year.
One year, the situation was so bad
that I was given an extra £50,000 to spend on marketing (the under-spend from a different department) with the deadline of
just one week to spend all that money!! And that was in addition to
my annual marketing budget, which was also under-spent!!
This article is not meant to be a
criticism of the National Health Service or of NHSBT. I'm still very proud to
be a blood donor, and I'm even more proud to be one of the very few people in
the UK who has donated 75 times during my life. But I see this as yet another
example of the terrible management practices going on throughout the National
Health Service, wasting vast amounts of money that should be spent on patient
care.
In the UK we are constantly being
bombarded with politicians telling us that the NHS needs more funding. While
not denying that they are right, I have to pose the question of what is the
point in giving even more tax payers’ money to the NHS, when the incompetent
managers who run Britain's health service waste so much of the cash that they already
have?
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