The glories of adding just another little bit or two to the bureaucratic requirements
The Telegraph has been noting that many trained - and perhaps retired - clinical staff are having problems with being able to sign up to aid in rolling out the vaccines:
Retired doctors and nurses desperate to help with the UK's mass vaccination drive have been kept out by bureaucracy and seen their offers of assistance ignored.
Earlier this week, The Telegraph revealed that, of the 40,000 doctors and nurses who applied to return to the service in March, 30,000 were eligible but only 5,000 had been given jobs by July.
Following the approval of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine earlier this week, the Royal College of GPs warned that the "jabbing workforce" would require a significant boost in order to deliver doses to vulnerable groups as quickly as possible.
But retired medics have told The Telegraph their offers of help have either gone unanswered or the lengthy bureaucratic and "insulting" application process has prevented them from returning.
We thought it might be fun - a perverse sense of what is fun is required for being a think tanker - to find out how true this all is. So, we went off to find out.
Join the NHS vaccine team, then being a retired clinician, looking for a paid job (£11 or £12 an hour) as a vaccinator. Among the requirements is this:
NHS statutory and mandatory training
The portal that tells us what that is is here.
Level 1
Conflict Resolution – Level 1 (updated)
Data Security Awareness – Level 1 (updated)
Equality and Diversity and Human Rights – Level 1 (updated)
Fire Safety – Level 1 (due for review 2021)
Health, Safety and Welfare – Level 1 (due for review 2021)
Infection Prevention and Control – Level 1 (updated)
Moving and Handling – Level 1 (updated)
Preventing Radicalisation – Basic Prevent Awareness (updated)
Resuscitation – Level 1 (updated)
Safeguarding Children – Level 1 (updated)
Safeguarding Adults – Level 1
That’s right. In order to jab people with a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic you need to have training in human rights, diversity, equality and radicalisation prevention. Oh, and you have to have the document to prove that you have this training or no helping out in the middle of a pandemic for you.
We can’t help but think that perhaps some parts of this statutory and mandatory training might be put aside for the moment. You know, emergency, pandemic, all that? That not being, though, how bureaucracy works.
At the larger level this is the problem with the continual accretion of rules about who may do what, where and when. It might be - possibly, you understand - a good thing that all companies sign a modern slavery statement. Or, as in the US, listed companies a blood minerals one. Or here, all medics have training to aid in noting that teenagers turning up in a full body burqa might not be an entirely and solely cultural issue. But as we continue to add such requirements, each possibly justified, or sensible, or even just nice to have, then the entire system becomes incapable of actually doing anything, or of varying from the normal, run of the mill, course of events.
This being a problem because that reality outside the window doesn’t stay still. Thus one of the necessary requirements for our institutional arrangements is flexibility. Exactly the thing that the requirement for 21 different forms to jab arms doesn’t allow.
Drowning in a welter of forms, trainings and licensures just isn’t the way to run a country. Perhaps we should change our system then?