Elusive Figures

At the Board meeting of the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust on 28th September 2006 Fiona Edwards was asked to provide a figure for how many service users employed in manual jobs - i.e. not user involvment posts - were employed at the national minimum wage by the Surrey and Borders Tryst.

Fiona declined to provide a figure . Board member Roshan Bailey broke from the sheepish silence the board had maintained throughout the entire discussion of the therapeutic payments issue - thanks guys - to bravely and with a clear note of exasperation in her voice suggest to Fiona that the Trust needed to be able to demonstrate a better record of employing its own service users in a wide variety of ordinary jobs.

I am going to remind Fiona that we still want this question answered.

At the moment we can only surmise, from Fiona's unhelpfulness, that the Surrey & Borders NHS Trust employs very few service users in manual positions and that for all the talk of modernisation of its work services and wads of cash paid to the self-important busybodies from the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health the Surrey and Borders Trust is still unlawfully discriminating against its service users when it comes to employing them itself.

Lets see an improvement in those figures Fiona - less fancy user involvment posts for paid stooges like the ones who agreed to cut the garden centre workers payments, and more users, on at least the national minimum wage, in simple straighforward ordinary jobs around the Trust so long as they want to and have the ability to do them.

In short Fiona, we expect you to modernise the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust itself, not simply jiggle around with and flog off your ' lets pretend ' work services.

It would be a good idea to try to get figures for how many service users are employed in non user involvment jobs across all NHS MH trusts as I think we would simply find that there is a clear and unlawful pattern to this self-righteous preaching of equality of opportunity in the public gaze but the same old discriminatory practices when it came to doing anything about it.

Its time to put up or shut up Fiona. Please provide the employment figures we have asked for so we at least know where we stand with Surrey and Borders as an employer and how far your Trust needs to go to actually practice what it preaches.

Oh and if you have any gardening jobs, please send me an application form because although it doesnt sit very well with some people I wouldnt mind an ordinary stable job at the national minimum wage level and bearing in mind that I've spent my entire life savings and lope from threatenened eviction notice to threatened eviction notice every other week trying to make ends meet, I dont think I need to feel ashamed to ask for an ordinary job I can actually do. Do you?