My previous post has reminded me of this...
I've worked at three NHS trusts in my time, and they all seem to be the same in this. Perhaps some of you other FUHLs* can chip in...

Never mind best/worst man for the job, the person who gets appointed generally seems to be the one who was there the longest. I lost count of the number of times people turned up to my "Basic Computer Skills" training course because they'd just been made team leader and needed to learn to use "Spreadsheets, whatever they are" to make up rotas and holiday charts. The rationale being that they couldn't give the job to the 19 year old lad who started last year who's a whizz with all things IT, as "He's only a kid, he's only been here five minutes and no-one will listen to him".

Imagine giving a guy an HGV licence, then telling him that he's got to learn to drive an articulated lorry by Monday because he's got a delivery to do in Southend, or taking some guy from the factory floor at Boeing and making him the new Chief Executive because he's been there longer than anyone else? Madness.

Okay, this is just a rant, there's not really any point, I'm not offering a solution and it's not funny. Feel free to move along/abuse/ignore me :)

tl;dr version: RRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!


*FUHL = Fed Up Hospital Lackey
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 15:16, 15 replies)

most people with limted it experience can learn how to use excel to make up a rota or a holiday chart in an hour or so
Apart from that your analogies are spot on
( Light In Chains maker of the ikea sofa, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 15:31, closed)

True enough.
But they're definitely starting from a disadvantaged position if they're not even sure what a spreadsheet is as they've never used a computer before...

EDIT: Sorry, just noticed you said "Limited IT experience". Yep, absolutely. I was talking about people with no IT experience though.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 15:42, closed)

apart from maybe some of the old ladies of the WRVS there are painfully few NHS employees who have NEVER used a computer.

( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 9:38, closed)

You've clearly never worked at the same trusts I did, AB
I started a training session once with a chap from the post room who had been told he could use the internal email system to find out where people worked when envelopes hadn't been addressed properly.

After going through the basics of logging in and loading the email program, he interrupted me and said "Sorry, but can we go right back to the start please? How do you actually turn the computer itself on?"

People with that level of IT knowledge were a regular occurrence. I had another woman come for training who told me afterwards she'd been so worried about using a computer (in case she broke it and shut the whole hospital down) that she'd been up all the previous night, unable to sleep.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 11:42, closed)

Not necessarily the longest
At the last NHS trust I worked at, I did the Key Skills For Managers course.

Through chatting to the other people (all of whom were medical), I found out something interesting:
When it comes to medical staff, there are those who aren't suited to the caring professions. They might be rough with the patients, the might have rubbish bedside manner, they might just be useless. rather than getting rid of these satff, the trust will invariably move them to a position whereby they aren't directly dealing with patients. So to a team leader role. Often, they aren't suited to the day-to-day management of staff, they trained to be a clinician, afterall, so they will cause problems in the team and complaints will be made and the person will be moved again, probably to a Assistant Department Manager role, where they will be equally useless and moved to a position where they aren't actually running anything, but are getting paid a lot to do it.

This means that there are a lot of clinical managers on £70K+ who have got into that position by being completely useless at everything they have turned their hands to.
(ScousersPet, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 15:37, closed)

Blimey, I hadn't thought of it like that.
I'm not convinced that my last trust had the presence of mind to even do that though... they were terrified of the consultants. One of them even managed to wangle a laptop that was completely different to the standard trust-issue, because he didn't like the ordinary ones. Also, it was set up to boot up and run without any passwords, because he always had trouble remembering them.

When I spoke to my senior manager about this, the reponse was "Well, he knows how to fix you so he knows how to break you, it's worth keeping on his good side", followed by an explanation of how much money he brought into the hospital with all the operations he did.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 15:47, closed)

Yep
To all of this. My direct line manager had a number of nicknames from "useless fat cunt" through to "sexfinger" due to the fact that everything he touched he fucked.

He was a paramedic who was removed from operational duties for being so fat that he once crouched down to care for a patient on the ground and wasn't able to stand back up. The fire brigade had to stand him up.

Similarly I know a number of people who work on the response cars because no fucker can stand to work on an ambulance with them for 12 minutes, let alone 12 hours.
( Undercovercarrot got done for gross misconduct on..., Thu 6 Sep 2012, 19:17, closed)

"Sexfinger" is possibly my favourite nickname ever :)
I think I'm going to have to steal that one...
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 19:34, closed)

^^^This^^^
Oh, so very much, this.
( Snappyuk gets BIGGER with free sample., Thu 6 Sep 2012, 21:48, closed)

Happy candle day!

(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 0:18, closed)

Many fanks.

( Snappyuk gets BIGGER with free sample., Fri 7 Sep 2012, 16:48, closed)

I've worked in IT within the NHS for 10 years now....
....and have come across so much incompetence that I could probably flood this QOTW. However I'm lazy and crap at telling stories in text, so I won't.

I've never directly worked within a hospital but I have worked for an Ambulance service, and as part of that I've carried out PTS IT installations on hospital premises. This story isn't about incompetence, but about the baffling political correctness and the pink and fluffy HR madness that seemed to infect the NHS at Trust level in around 2004.
So in an act of NHS IT staff solidarity, I thought I'd post it here and share your pain.

We were taking over PTS roles from another Ambulance Service so we were rolling out our IT kit to the various hospitals in the county. Most places were a simple setup, we'd install an ISDN line and router into an office and some PC's and printers depending on the staffing levels.
At one particular site there was a main office of about six PTS staff, and a single person desk near the out-patients section of the hospital so that patients could sort out their transport needs as they left their appointments. The single desk was in a locked office with a shuttered front, almost like a small newspaper kiosk.

The member of staff that was to man this single PTS kiosk wasn't around while I was doing the setup of the IT so I did the install of the network kit and PC as normal with no input from the user. Job done, I returned to base.

The next week I got a call from our head of HR asking me to attend a meeting. I attended as asked and was told that the member of staff working on the kiosk had put a complaint in against IT because the mouse on the PC had been placed on the right hand side of the keyboard for a right handed user, and not on the left hand side for a left handed user (the user was left handed). As such, this was seen as descrimatory towards the left handed user.

I wasn't ever in any danger of being disciplined over the issue, but we had to then make our procedure for any new installation that we placed the mouse dead centre above the keyboard so that the user could choose the side they wanted, as opposed to the user just picking the bloody thing up and moving it from the right to the left.

I found out that the person making the complaint was a right pain in the arse and would moan about anything. But the fact that it was even raised as an issue, never mind a meeting with HR needing to take place, still irks me a bit.
( Evil Bastardo, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 17:04, closed)

Blimey, that's just fucking ridiculous O_o
The woman I posted about a few below this one who works on the helpdesk at my last trust once assigned a call to me to replace a left-handed mouse with a right-handed one.

When I phoned the user I found that the buttons weren't reassigned or anything, it was purely a matter of picking up the mouse and placing it on the other side of the keyboard.

When the user said "Why couldn't the woman who answered the phone tell me that?" I was genuinely at a loss as to what I should say :D
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Thu 6 Sep 2012, 18:40, closed)

It was ridiculous
But nothing in the NHS surprises me these days. Thankfully my days in this fine institution are numbered due to closure of the place I work.

I've met a few first liners that match the description of the woman you posted about. Especially some of the people we've had on contract over the years.
( Evil Bastardo, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 16:05, closed)

Isn't that just large organisations the world over.
The Dilbert principle of 'promote until competent' in action.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 9:37, closed)

Possibly
The only large corporation I've ever worked for is the NHS, so I don't know.

All my private sector jobs have been for small companies
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 11:43, closed)

It's the Peter principle, which states that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.
(Phudbree oh man, the Doric Yorick, Fri 7 Sep 2012, 18:58, closed)