Kovalam, losing my faith and redundancy.

Kovalam - April 2013

Being warm in Kovalam is about so much more than the heat. I suppose I'd better do the travel guide bit first.

Kovalam is a village/town in Kerala on the south west coast of India. Wikipedia has the following web page on the place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kovalam and TripAdvisor has a useful travel forum if you have any questions. You can get there either through the gulf airlines Etihad, Qatar or Emirates changing at Abu Dhabi , Doha or Dubai respectively or via one of the Indian carriers flying to various Indian cities and then taking an internal flight. Prices start at just under £500 return upwards, at the mo expect to pay about £600 to get there and back, Southall Travel is a good place to start. Hotel prices vary significantly between low season, end of April to end of October and high season, basically the UK winter. Average Temperature is roughly the same the year round 28 - 32 C but rain fall and humidity is dramatically different in the monsoon season,  UK summer time. The area is malaria free but its in the tropics so there are occasional monsoon outbreaks of dengue fever. Moral of the story here is hit the DEET, buy and use a good mossie net. You will be bitten but usually more in the first few days, after which one of two things will happen, I've never quite been sure which, either you stop smelling like "fresh meat" and build up a local fugg from 24/7 curry eating or you adapt your behaviours load up a layer of DEET and suntan lotion, either way you get bitten less. In truth its probably a bit of both.

OK tourist bit over, there is lots of stuff on the web about Kovalam, Lighthouse Beach, and Kerala and since you are reading this blog obviously you have a computer or tablet or phone or all three. Go surf.

We had arrived, tired, grubby but happy. I was retired, Sarah on holiday. Long before we had received confirmation of my redundancy, still less than 36 hours earlier, we had spent a long time discussing our future before we had left.

Loosing my faith

We had both had enough, if I hadn't been made redundant we were going to get out anyway, redundancy just allowed us to do it earlier. Though I was now welI and better equipped mentally and emotionally to do the job I'd returned to, I had lost my faith. For me working in the NHS was always an act of faith, I was a believer (I'm now tempted to break into The Monkeys classic which has just wormed its way into my head, and on reading this, if you are of a particular age, into yours too, but i won't, i'll just hum along as I type. Sarah is now giving me the look. The Great British Bake Off is on TV, Shhh! Best just hum along inside my head).

When I joined in 1979 I believed the NHS in was important, people cared about patients above everything else, what i was doing was worthwhile and others thought I was going to be good at it (whatever the "it" was at the time) and so did I. Note I joined the NHS, not just took up my post, I was committed, shiny faced, intense, knew far more about everything than i do now and all in all a bit of a dick but I meant well.

By the end of the previous November in 2012 I'd stopped believing. Too many bored meetings, too much phaffing, too many restless nights and dead eyes. Maybe i'd seen one too many "brilliant new plan" which was just a re-hashing of the last initiative or listened to one two many jaded messiah promising to lead us to health care nirvana. I was disappointed, pissed off... but was I ready to move on?

I'd been through a perfect storm twice and survived. I was fitter and stronger than I'd ever been so surely I was OK to carry on this time? The feelings would pass, they had before, it was just another reorganisation and i just needed another few weeks in the sun back in India. So why the nagging doubt? Then it hit me, I was thinking about the storm metaphor when it happened. A picture popped into my head much like The Monkeys did earlier singing that bloody song. A picture of a flattened house, somewhere in the deep south, bible belt country and yes, I do actually think like this. I told you i watched too much TV.

Setting: Tornado Ally, somewhere in the Deep South

Cast:
Jim Bob - Steve Martin reprising his role in The Jerk
Reporter - Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy.
Opening Scene:
Camera pans left over a scene of devastation, a house and farm reduced to matchwood to reveal Ron Burgundy,(TV Anchorman) and Jim Bob (a local farmer)

And.... Action!!!

RB: "Tell us Jim Bob, what happened when the tornado hit"
JB:  "I'll tell ya, it was scairy, whole house came down round me and the folks" Jim Bob looks excitedly into the camera grinning.
JB:  "Whole damn house, not like in '84 or '89 or 2011 when just the windas and roof got blowed away
"Praise Jesus, God must be on our side. We're not giv'n up now though, not with God on our side.     "We's gunna rebuild, right thar, right where that thar house has allus stood".
RB: "Thanks Jim Bob, I'm Ron Burgundy, tellin it as it is here in tornado ally, Now, back to the studio where Candy has the latest update on the NHS re-organisation and that attempt to make the world's largest
cock ring."

Its at this point I realise I want to scream at the mental image on my Head TV,

Yes Jim Bob, God must be on your side but how many hints do you want him to give you?
MOVE HOUSE!!!"

How many hints did I need?

I didn't need to worry, events were about to over take me, the long heralded reorganisation was about to hit my bit of the NHS.

Redundancy

The NHS Board had been formed and was about to impose a one size fits all structure on its outposts or Area Teams. There was no job for me in this new way of doing things, to be fair if I'd had the pot of money they had to play with i'd have come up with something very similar. My role was to be taken by someone medically qualified, something I had been arguing for for years.

My post was made redundant just before Christmas. Other folk in the PCT at my pay-grade but without the length of service had already jumped ship, some into the emergent Clinical Commissioning Groups , others shifted their CVs and career direction. Some were caught in the headlights like frightened rabbits, buried their heads in the mountains of work from the day job, left piling up by the reorganisation, kidding themselves that as they were so busy their jobs must be safe. They weren't. There were a lot of very angry, hurt and bewildered folk kicking around a fast emptying office. Not a healthy environment for a newly recovering transference junkie like me. I "worked from home".

You might be thinking "Hang on, this was December and you said you got notified you were outski at the end of March?" Yep, that's right, my job was made redundant in December but until April i was in the twilight zone, unable to plan for a future in case "suitable alternative employment" was found for me, and because I was so expensive to get rid of I was told my redundancy approval had to go all the way to the Secretary of State.

Suitable alternative employment is basically a job no one wants or they can't fill from ring fenced and matched folk and it gets chucked into a pool. If you had a CV which vaguely matched key elements of the job one of two things happened, you were matched to the job and it was yours or you have to go through a selection process. aka interview. I know people who went through loads of interviews, double figures in a few cases. Talk about dead eyes. My CV though  impressive came with a big price tag and had become very specialist. I was under qualified for the only job I had recent experience of  in the new structure but was excluded on the new essential criteria, I not a medic. I wasn't matched to a single job, or "invited" to a single interview but we still had to live on the edge for three months. I had just come back from being mental.

Here is an extract from the NHS Constitution, read it when you are feeling down, start to question just why you are there and in need of a laugh. To cheer it up try setting your internal narrator to Kermit the Frog. It works for me and I found Kermit was invaluable when reading DoH technical guidance, try it, pick your own voice it can be fun. Anyway, here's what the NHS Constitution, the guide for how it should work,  says about compassion.

"Compassion: We ensure compassion is central to the care we provide and respond with humanity to each persons pain, distress, anxiety or need. We search for things we can do, however small to give comfort and relieve suffering. We find time for patients, families and carers as well as those we work along side. We do not wait to be asked, because we care. Its time to put on make up, its time to light the lights...."

Ok so I added the bit at the end, Kermit just had to jazz it up but the rest is a direct quote. I could make some cheep comment and quote a Daily Mail headline here but even though I think this re-organisation was a brutal process it had to be done, (IT WAS THE  MONEY, STUPID!)  I still know that most of the folk working in the NHS abide by this section of the constitution (minus the make up and lights) and I was supported though those three months by good friends. The Board, in the rush to save the cash forgot the bit i've underlined. There has to be a better way next time and i hope they find one soon, before the next time, that next time isn't far away.

Mmmmm its was warm in Kovalam, 32 C, a gentle breeze took the edge off the heat as kids from SISP rode in on the 2-3 foot surf. I was listening to the Clash on my iPod, in my 'phones Joe was banging it out like only he could.
 "... so you got to let me knooooow...Should I stay or should I go?"
I smiled, the decision was already made for me.
The NHS and I had gone our separate ways and were swiftly moving apart.
It was good to be back in Kovalam.