I had to quit NHS admin – I felt like a workhorse flogged too hard

I had recently resigned from a well-paid job when I started working for the NHS in an administrative role. I was happy to be performing a useful service in the interests of a larger social goal, while no longer being required to write strategy documents or meet financial targets. However, in my seven months as a hospital specialty coordinator (a posh term for medical secretary, invented in order to create a sense of potential job progression), I experienced more stress – of several different kinds – than I have ever experienced.

The NHS is 25 years behind the rest of the country in terms of technology and management techniques

After the 2013 final report of the public inquiry into the “deaths by human error” at the Mid Staffordshire NHS foundation trust, the induction training programme for all new starters in the NHS – both clinical and administrative – was substantially rewritten. The major change in the day-long training sessions was the section on transparency and accountability. All new staff, we were told, were encouraged to follow the trust’s whistleblowing policy: this meant that we should feel duty-bound to report any incident, however small, that might jeopardise the wellbeing of a patient.

The NHS is 25 years behind the rest of the country in terms of technology and management techniques. Despite millions of pounds spent on computer technology in the NHS, I was amazed to discover that everything done within the health service – every clinic letter, investigative test, scan result – requires a hard copy file note to accompany its electronic counterpart. Across the country, hospital administrative staff, such as myself, waste thousands of hours each week trying to locate hard copy patient notes that could be anywhere within numerous hospital departments, and in many cases, across several different hospitals.

The most familiar sight in any hospital admin department is overloaded trolleys with patient notes being trundled from one section of the hospital to another, and overflowing filing trays that require staff to come in at weekends just so that they don’t start Monday mornings depressed by the amount of filing they have to do.

I could not work out why technological advancements and concern for the environment could have somehow bypassed the NHS, the fifth largest employer in the world. Jeremy Hunt’s goal of a paperless health service by 2018 looked to be a long way off, particularly since most of the managers preferred the security of hard copies (as back-up in the event of a computer glitch, and also in terms of patient confidentiality, since paper is not vulnerable to computer hacking).

Managers struggled to address the problems of their increasingly demoralised staff, who were trying to cope not just with the paperwork, but also with the constant demands of patients who wanted to know why their test had not been scheduled, or why they had not received their results. Absenteeism was rife because staff frequently called in sick with stress. On some days I found myself doing three people’s jobs. If a consultant was sick, their clinic for that day was cancelled. If a medical secretary, or two, or three, called in sick, the patients kept coming, and so did the accompanying paperwork.

I felt like I didn’t have time to breathe, let alone take a lunch break, and inevitably, when people are stressed, they take it out on each other. In my experience, the consultants, registrars and junior doctors were polite and considerate to the admin staff; and the patients were understanding and forbearing: it was the other admin staff who were the most unpleasant to one another. On one occasion, for example, a group of admin staff organised an official meeting to complain that their colleagues were “hogging” the few hours per week of a temporary helper.

Some managers tried a technological fix to the problem of overwork and paperwork – “two computer screens will make you more efficient by speeding up your processing times” – whereas what we needed was less absenteeism and better systems. We were, however, forbidden to use any external agency staff to cope with the dire shortages. These were considered an expensive luxury at a time of cost-cutting. Since all managers were assessed on their ability to achieve targets and avoid serious incidents, the real reasons for the poor performance of their staff were disregarded as long as no breaches of the trust’s policies needed to be reported.

In the end, I felt like a workhorse who was flogged too hard for trying and failing to shoulder the burdens of the job. I have left the NHS and am working in a job where I no longer dread the thought of Monday morning. I never reported a colleague through the whistleblowing hotline and, as far as I know, no one reported me. I can’t help feeling guilty, though, at the thought of the continued toil of my former workhorse colleagues I left behind.

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I had to quit NHS admin – I felt like a workhorse flogged too hard