For a number of reasons I had to go and get the swine flu injection today at my local vaccination centre in my local HSE centre.
On arrival, I was given a simple form to fill out by a very efficient and polite member of staff who was very helpful with anyone having issues. The form was very straightforward. From there I was taken to another room where another member of staff inputted the form onto a PC, wrote a reference number on it and then send me to the nurse who gave me the jab. I then had to wait 15 mins to see if I had a negative reaction, give my form to one of 3 other staff sitting at laptops in that waiting room who filled out a simple 5 line card and gave it back to me when my 15 minutes were up
Thinking about it going home (I'm an operations manager), it took 5 staff to "manage" the bureaucracy of a nurse giving the flu jab. I'm not giving out about the staff involved and this is not a public sector staff bashing post. They were all very nice, helpful and professional in all that they did, but 5 staff and 4 laptops to manage a queue of around a dozen people and manage the inputting of around 15 lines of data per person?
Simple things, (pre-print the reference number on the forms for example) could have eliminated chunks of this and if I had been asked to size this as a piece of business for tender, I'd have done it as a nurse and 2 staff at most
If we assume for a second that the average pay of each bureaucrat was €25k, then including fringe and ancillary costs, it's costing the state at least €150kpa to administer the delivery of the flu jab in a small country town. Note this is just to administer it, not to actually stick the needle in.
HSE management have a lot to answer for as far as I am concerned, they are throwing our money away
On arrival, I was given a simple form to fill out by a very efficient and polite member of staff who was very helpful with anyone having issues. The form was very straightforward. From there I was taken to another room where another member of staff inputted the form onto a PC, wrote a reference number on it and then send me to the nurse who gave me the jab. I then had to wait 15 mins to see if I had a negative reaction, give my form to one of 3 other staff sitting at laptops in that waiting room who filled out a simple 5 line card and gave it back to me when my 15 minutes were up
Thinking about it going home (I'm an operations manager), it took 5 staff to "manage" the bureaucracy of a nurse giving the flu jab. I'm not giving out about the staff involved and this is not a public sector staff bashing post. They were all very nice, helpful and professional in all that they did, but 5 staff and 4 laptops to manage a queue of around a dozen people and manage the inputting of around 15 lines of data per person?
Simple things, (pre-print the reference number on the forms for example) could have eliminated chunks of this and if I had been asked to size this as a piece of business for tender, I'd have done it as a nurse and 2 staff at most
If we assume for a second that the average pay of each bureaucrat was €25k, then including fringe and ancillary costs, it's costing the state at least €150kpa to administer the delivery of the flu jab in a small country town. Note this is just to administer it, not to actually stick the needle in.
HSE management have a lot to answer for as far as I am concerned, they are throwing our money away