I read today in "The Sunday Post" newspaper that our NHS could afford to employ another 750 nurses if they could stop the fraud that is occurring within its organisation.
Apparently in the next few days they are launching a new campaign to make employees aware of the problem with DVDs and other educational tools to make staff think about the issue and help stamp it out.
Reading that report made me want to cry and laugh at the same time.
My mind went back ten years and writing my chapter for the book Whistleblowing in the Social Services on the subject of "Acquiescence in Wrongdoing" ISBN 0 340 65245 4. I had included an extract from a survey done by the Audit Commission (a government body charged with auditing what is happening in our public bodies) that had been published four years earlier (in 1994) showing we were losing about 6 million pounds (approx 12 million dollars) a year. This did not include the laptops etc that walked out in the arms of employees and visitors and never returned. If the Audit commission had said we had a serious problem in 1994 why it take 14 years for our government to take action?
(Oh I remember now. Some of our government ministers are currently under investigation for financial mistakes in the election campaigns so they need to deflect the newspaper headlines. Or is this just me being too cynical?)
That same report also said the commission had surveyed the Heads of Internal Audits in the various health boards and one of every five of them had said they feared they would lose their job if they reported all the weaknesses in the system that they knew about to the NHS Board of Directors. The very people employed to protect our finances against fraud were afraid to speak out. What is our country coming to? Sorry what has our country already come to?
In 1995 Mike Probert Lewis from the Institute of Internal Auditors wrote "Blowing the whistle is the short way to put yourself on the long term unemployment register".
I know I did it!
We need people to stand up and be counted when it comes to fraud and theft. Nowadays someone who is putting in false mileage claims etc is referred to as "fiddling their expenses" and most people would turn a blind eye to it. Yet if we call it by its true name THEFT we would stand accused of not just turning a blind eye but "aiding and abetting in a serious crime".
Maybe if we all reported every instance of expense fiddling in every organisation we would have a country rich enough to support everyone who needed our help. I would support anyone who was willing to speak out but recommend at few safety precautions to be taken to prevent the abuser turning around and passing the blame to you. I have them spelt out in full in another article. If anyone wants them please contact me using the comments box below. Your details will not be published.
I was listening to a news item the other day about a person from Ghana who was discharged from one of our hospitals before her treatment was completed so she could be evicted from the country.
Apparently she had come to the UK and was seeking asylum to stay. She was requiring kidney dialysis treatment to stay alive but if she was sent back to her own country she would be unable to afford treatment and would probably die within months if not weeks. The argument for kicking her out of the country was she failed to get a longer visa to stay legally so had to leave.
Today I heard a different but similar case where a woman had become HIV + after torture in her own country but this was not apparent until she had been in our country for some time. Again she was being kicked out and could not treatment back in her home country so could quickly die even through we had the drugs that would save her life.
One politician was arguing we had no responsibility to care for her and there were millions just like her who were close to death in the same way back in Africa which we were not helping so why make an exception for her. Our own hospitals had a long waiting list with people from this country dying as there was no facility to help them.
Did the Good Samaritan stay he had no responsibility or did he do what he could for the one he could help?
It reminds of a story I have heard several times in different ways over the years but it essentially goes like this.
A man was walking along the beach one morning and saw someone bending down every so often and throwing something into the sea. Catching him up he was surprised to see it was a youth picking up a starfish and returning it the water. When asked why the youth replied because "if I don’t it will dry up here in the hot sun and die". The older man said "but the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of these starfish you can’t make a difference to them". The youth replied by bending over and picking up another one and tossing it back into the water saying "but it makes a difference to this one".
I don’t know where the money would come from to pay for everyone. That’s not my job but I do know that Jesus would have done something to have helped them and we are meant to be his body here on earth. But what can we do and how can we do it?
Anyone got any answers to help me think this through?
Ron
Firstly I apologise to you who were coming back here to follow the build we were doing for Peterhead-Methodist church.
We had been doing a lot of experimenting with new ideas live on this domain for them. But have now transferred the site back over to their main site and taken it down from here to avoid any duplicate penalties being put on them by the search engines such as Google. This is the reason we have tried a new theme on the blog one that is a bit cleaner and easy to read. I think you will agree it certainly looks easier than some I am associated with elsewhere.
We will be using this domain again to be able to speak out for things we believe in and help other believers and non-believers discover something about our faith.
Give us a couple of weeks to finish another site we are nearly completely finished and we will come back to this one to provide our full service again. i do have some major plans for this site but I only have 25 hours a day to work sleep and pray.
Or that is what it seems like I am trying to do.
Ron
