Now don’t get me wrong, I will take an extra day’s holiday just as much as the next person, but, I would willingly, eagerly even, give the Diamond Jubilee Bank Holiday back, as long as they called off the whole shenanigans! Celebrate if you must, but keep the noise down!
Monarchy v Republic. My middle name is not Cromwell for nothing!
Anyone else who does sixty years in the same job would be given a gold clock, a pat on the back, a leaving do at the nearest pub and packed off in a black cab with, hopefully, a half decent pension to last them the rest of their lives. And then forgotten about.
There would not be four days of merriment, Union Jack hats, street parties, River Pageant, State Procession, no-go areas, beer festivals (which I approve of: Oh come on! even Roundheads liked beer!), special stickers on ambulances, bridges closed over the River Thames, the Capital packed to bursting point, gridlocked roads and London Emergency Services in danger of meltdown.
That said, we haven’t seen the plans for the Chief Executive’s leaving do yet!
____________________
Talking about meltdown does bring me on to a more serious issue. Where is our Service going? More to the point I suppose, where is this government pushing our Service?
Lack of funds. Lack of staff. A slow recipe for a downward spiral towards meltdown and failure.
Failure, not because our Service is not good enough, or our staff are not good enough: but failure because we are being set up to fail.
Those two anti-NHS weapons – The Comprehensive Spending Review and The Health and Social Care Bill – are the pincer movement that the Private Sector will ride on the back of as the Coalition justifies private ambulance involvement and outsourcing because we cannot cope.
Cannot cope through lack of funds and lack of staff. The downward spiral turning into a circle!
We have great people working within the LAS, and it is a great Service to work for, but even great people get to a point were enough is enough.
The people of London are the ones who will lose out in the end. More funds and more staff are not, of course, a magic wand and panacea on their own, but, they will give us a fighting chance to get off this merry-go-round.Â
I know that I am like a broken record over this but, not only the union and it’s members have to shout over the sleight of hand being performed before our very eyes, senior people within the Service who also see what is happening, need to shout with us.Â
Shout for more funds. Shout for more staff. Shout before it is too late.
____________________
As we know, Boris Johnson won the London Mayoral election. That is bad news for the London Ambulance Service in my view.
Behind that amusing, sociable exterior, there is a right-wing Tory with neo-liberal views. A small state, big business, public bad – private good Tory.
Mind you, not everything turned out bad. In the Greater London Assembly (GLA) elections Deputy Tory Mayor Richard Barnes lost his seat. Brian Coleman, Tory Chair of the London Fire Authority, also lost his seat.
This is the Fire Authority, if you remember, that supported merger/takeover of the LAS.
Brian Coleman said that this idea was “just the tip of the iceberg”. I think he must have been looking the other way when the voters ripped a hole in his flagship!
Let’s hope that idea now goes up in flames alongside Boris’s fantasy of running an ambulance service. Don’t hold your breath though!
____________________
The Department of Health acceptance and launch of the Response Time Clock Change is to be welcomed. A real piece of good news for once. Change for the better.
This is good for the patient and safer for the staff. It gives EOC staff more time to gain further information from 999 callers to ensure that more appropriate decisions can be made on the type of resource to send.
It should stop ambulance crews being sent out only to be cancelled time and time again.
Unison supported this change completely.
____________________
 Information of all issues can be found elsewhere on our website.
___________________
If you are reading this, work for the London Ambulance Service or are eligible to join, and are not yet a member of UNISON Join Today!
 I Am Frontline You Are Frontline We Are All Frontline
We are stronger together.
Eric Roberts
Branch Secretary.
