My partner is a Psychiatric Nurse, she works on average 11 hours a weekday and 6 hours a weekend. That's a total of at least 61 hours a week, some evenings we get to chat for 1/2 an hour and try to spend some time in the garden or walking the dogs on a weekend, I am self employed so often work weekends also.
My partner has a caseload of around 45 patients with enduring Mental Health problems often resulting in Hospitalisation, Police involvement or Housing and other agency issues.
Her workload is astonishing, I know nobody who works as intensively for such long hours in an environment where life or death is an actual and constant concern.
This is grossly unfair on Her and Her patients and in fact society as a whole as often relatives are drawn in and as one in three of us is likely to require some sort of help in the course of our lives that's the majority of us.
Her employer is a Trust which effectively means it's private and not run directly by the NHS as we used to know it although many of the staff have been NHS employees in the past.
The trust works on a model which apparently is based on that of the Toyota Automotive company, this I feel has something to do with the disconnect which is apparent between the service and it's outcomes and the actual requirements of society.
To put it in perspective in Automotive terms the factory is unable to cope with demand, there are many parts missing from the finished cars and the service department is hemmed in by the cars waiting in the car park and down the surrounding streets.
Real people who through no fault of their own are facing Mental Health problems are being treated as a commodity and there is a myriad of non conforming shapes being stuffed into round holes so average outcomes are untimely and sometimes sadly fatal.
In the UK where the magic money tree has gone the way of the Dodo because the government would rather not collect taxes from the most able to pay who are their own social strata, or international money trees with brigades of tax lawyers, funding for essential public services is being eroded and in the case of Mental Health is totally inadequate, this in itself is a problem which is of the gravest concern, as a service which should be designed to help those affected by the increasing pressures of modern life collapses around our ears and the society itself collapses it is becoming a self fulfilled prophecy.
Somehow we as a society need to fight for better funding for Mental Health services because if we don't there will be some very poorly and often disturbing people who will be without a safety net putting totally unprecedented pressure on their family, friends and often complete strangers who will be completely overwhelmed.
The staff that my partner works with are all without exception highly concerned and so should you be.
