2007 December 02 « A Midwife’s Muse

Last to know

December 2, 2007 at 9:47 pm | In Maternity Services, Musings, Work | 3 Comments

I feel as if I may have been left out of a loop, I haven’t had a chance to find out if anyone else knows, or knew. What have I been ignorant about? The first thing was our pay award. There was the information, on my payslip under the ‘messages from employer’, cunningly hidden in a little flap:-

Agenda For Change Pay Award – New rates paid November 2007 with arrears for October 2007. April – September 2007 arrears will be paid in January 2008.

Are they going to pay me interest on the monies they have been holding on to?

Recently the Healthcare Commission published the first part of their survey into Maternity Services. I read about it in the national papers, then today I read about it in our local paper and I was delighted to learn that our Trust had come out of it really well. There was even a quote from the Head of Maternity Services, apparently the staff are delighted with the results. Are we? Well of course we are. Well, we are now we know! Guess we failed the communication element of the survey, well the commission do say that it is one of the specific areas of concern.

No words

December 2, 2007 at 7:55 pm | In Miscellany | 3 Comments

I was woken by the phone this morning, and at first I couldn’t understand what the caller was telling me. I asked her to tell me again, and then I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. One of my friends was calling to tell me that her son was dead. They had gone into his bedroom this morning and found their 22 year old first-born had died, in the night, alone, ‘We didn’t hear him’ she sobbed. This lad had epilepsy, but apart from that was one of the healthiest people you could ever wish to meet. He was also one of the friendliest, chatty, and caring boys I have watched grow from a boy into a man, and now he has gone. I wanted to have said goodbye, what on earth are his family wishing, thinking, doing? I want to do something for them, help them in some way, do, say the right things but what is there to say? There cannot be the right words to say when someone has lost a child, a child they have nurtured, helped through all the stages of his growing, been there to witness him turn into a man, and then found him cold and lifeless in the room next to theirs.