Further Redundancies Announced

The NHSBT has announced another 600 redundancies over the next three years on top of the several hundred redundancies that have already taken place. This includes 240 more redundancies amongst front-line collections staff.

This was announced at the long awaited, much delayed, selective release of the McKinsey's report. Management is not willing to share the full report with their staff even though it cost hundreds of thousands of public money and the conclusions that were reached were not much different than what staff had been saying all along.

Management are still intent on closing the Tooting centre with 70 redundancies, leaving the whole of the South East with only one processing and testing centre. There are no plans to make any major expansions to the Colindale site, so it will have to cope with nearly tripling its work in an already over-crowded lab area.

We were told that we don't have enough donors to meet the current demand, yet the equivalent of four or five area teams are to be taken out by further redundancies. In answer to a question about how can we collect more blood with even fewer staff, especially with complaints about waiting times now the biggest single complaint from our donors, we were told to "Work smarter, not harder". Difficult to see how much smarter you can work when faced with 160 donors and ten staff as has happened several times recently in our area (and no doubt in the rest of the country as well).

The ACE project seems all but dead, certainly, the name will no longer be used as it stands for alternative collection environment and we have now been told that we will be moving completely in the opposite direction, i.e. fewer, larger sessions rather than more frequent, smaller sessions. This may be the reason that Richard Fry has been relieved of his duties in Donor Services and moved to a project dealing with workforce issues and solutions ('scoping' which probably isn't really a word but might mean 'looking at').