Somebody I know who was a senior nurse told
me that she once wrote a memo to her manager pointing out that some planned
changes in the hospital were not in patients’ best interests. The memo was
returned with just four letters on it: “J-F-D-I”.
It took some time to establish what the
manager meant. And it was a shock when the clarification came:
“Just F***ing Do It!”
That kind of unacceptable bullying is
apparently widespread in the NHS. The Guardian
has carried out a survey which shows a widespread bullying culture.
After the Mid-Staffordshire Hospital
scandal and the Francis Report of 2013 - which talks of “… a culture of fear in
which staff did not feel able to report concerns; a culture of secrecy in which
the trust board shut itself off from what was happening in its hospital and
ignored its patients; and a culture of bullying, which prevented people from
doing their jobs properly” (page 10) – we could have all reasonably expected
that this was a problem that was being addressed throughout the NHS. But
apparently it is not.
Everybody has to wake up and realise that
bullying cultures are not just facts of life that have to be tolerated. Not
only are they morally unacceptable but they are, as the Francis Report
demonstrates, systematically unsafe, nay dangerous.
People who question actions and policies
and orders should never be silenced with JFDI. They should be respected and
listened to and congratulated for expressing their concerns. Not to do so sows
the seeds of disaster. In civil aviation they learnt this long ago, not least
because the world’s worst aviation disaster seems to have occurred because
nobody wanted to challenge the bad decision of an authoritarian captain. But in
British public services – of which child protection is still an important part –
we have, apparently, a long, long way to go.
It’s not just sad, it’s scary.
