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Ewan Somerville at the Telegraph is on the Lived Experience story.
The NHS has hired an army of “lived experience” tsars on salaries of up to £115,000, despite ministers vowing a war on waste.
An army – so this recruitment ad we saw is just one of many.
Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT) is recruiting a “director for lived experience” who must have experiences of “a life altering health condition” and “significant power imbalances” in their use of health services.
The tsar will “ensure brave spaces” for people to give feedback and be based at St George’s Hospital, in Stafford, on a salary of £110,000-115,000 per year – four times that of a newly qualified nurse or junior doctor.
Why? Why pay four times more for “lived experience” than for arduous training and education? Why value “lived experience” boffins four times more than doctors and nurses?
The trust claims it is the first such board-level position in the health service, but The Telegraph has identified at least 20 “lived experience” job titles across seven NHS trusts, being paid a total of at least £600,000.
It really is bizarre. Sarcasm and bitter jokes aside, what is this? What does explain the enormous difference in compensation?
In January, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust recruited two lived experience directors to “disrupt conventional thinking”, designed to “enthuse, inspire, train and support diverse communities and seldom heard voices to keep co-creation at its core”.
Why is that four times more important than actual medical care?
Why does the NHS even need this? Do they have reason to believe the conventional thinking is flawed? The NHS has been running since 1948, I’d have thought it must be pretty well developed by now. As far as I can tell, the problems plaguing it are the result of chronic under-funding by Tories rather than from any internal problem.
I’m all for disrupting conventional thinking when conventional thinking is wrong, or repressive, or prevents us from succeeding at important things…like stopping climate change, getting people vaccinated, or whatever.
But not all conventional thinking is wrong or backwards. Some of it is conventional because it works, because it lines up with reality, because it is true. Such as: men cannot be women. A woman is an adult human female. Humans are sexually dimorphic. Sex is determined based on which gametes are produced – and for those that produce both gametes, such as some species of worms for instance, we have words to describe them, and those words do not include the word “trans”.
“Conventional thinking” has become one of those buzzwords like “western colonialist imperialist” or “white male” that are automatically assumed to be bad. There is nothing required; you don’t have to think, you don’t have to study, you don’t have to work at it, you just have to feel it. And that makes it attractive.
I could feel the earth was shaped like a triangle, but that wouldn’t make the square of the hypotenuse equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the earth, because the earth would remain round. I could feel my bathwater was really molasses, but that wouldn’t make it tasted good in cookies. I could feel I am a trained welder, but that wouldn’t save me – or the area around me – from the disaster that would occur when it came time for me to weld..
If I give this the most charitable interpretation I can, the job involves doing in depth interviews with the disabled, chronically ill, and anyone else with compromised health in order to figure out what specific support they might need to regain control of their lives again.
“Those pain meds, motorized wheelchair, and regular visits from a volunteer Companion have done wonders for me — thank God for that Director of Lived Experience!”
If I am cynical, the combination of “life altering health condition” and “significant power imbalances” reads trans, trans, trans. A “Director of Lived Experience” is what you hire when you either already have too many “Directors of Diversity Equity and Inclusion” or you just want something that sounds a bit snappier.
“I’m a Trans Woman who glimpsed the word “male” on my medical chart. The Director of Lived Experience is setting me up with a therapist while instituting major purges of the staff with reeducation programs for those who remain, thank God!”
It popped into my head this morning that there’s such a thing as a Patient Advocate – isn’t there? Maybe it’s a US title. Why not call this new job that instead of the ludicrous livedexperience label? And why make its salary 4 times that of nurses and junior doctors? Whywhywhy?
As noted above, not all “conventional thinking” is bad. A lot of it is pretty good. Context is everything. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis challenged the conventional thinking of his day when he championed medical hygeine. His way of thinking is now “conventional thinking” that we wouldn’t want to have “disrupted.”
The sort of “conventional thinking” I’d like to see disrupted is the idea that throwing money at high-priced consultants is the best, first choice to solving problems in the medical sector during a time of underfunding and staff burnout. Or at any time, for that matter.
Yes, I read it that way too. And because they’re being paid so much, wanting to give value for money, these Directors will feel the urge to make Grand Pronouncements, many of which will likely be beyond or irrelevant to their actual positions and “expertise.” “When you’re rich, they think you really know.” And because they are being paid so much, they will be listened to, whether what they say is sensable and true, or not. Not so much Value for money as Money for Nothing.