By Tim Worstall
From the house magazine of the Lanyard Classes:
Almost half of the NHS trusts in England have no earmarked funding to cover staff on maternity leave, according to analysis that raises fresh concerns about pressure on physiotherapy services.
Freedom of information requests sent to the trusts by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) found that 49% had neither a dedicated budget nor a policy to permit overspending to pay for maternity cover.
Oh, that’s interesting. So, maternity pay is a cost to employers, is it? Requiring a greater budget to cover? Well, doesn’t that just explain some part of the gender pay gap then? If women have greater non-wage employment costs then presumably wages will be lower to balance. But the point for us here is:
Where funding does exist, the analysis revealed that physiotherapy appears to be treated less favourably than other areas of healthcare. More than one in five trusts (22%) said their maternity cover arrangements did not extend to physiotherapy staff, compared with only 9% for nursing posts.
The CSP said failing to plan for maternity leave risked leaving overstretched teams to shoulder the same workload with fewer people, meaning patients waiting longer for treatment and rehabilitation.
The CSP is a Lanyard Class interest group and they’re clearly arguing for more money to be spent upon their interest.
Also in the house magazine of the Lanyard Classes:
NHS officials are shutting growing numbers of birth centres in a “shocking” denial of a woman’s right to have a midwife rather than a doctor oversee their baby’s birth, say campaigners.
Twelve birth centres – midwife-led maternity units – have closed in England since 2019. Birth centres play a key role in ensuring that women can choose whether to have their baby at a unit in a hospital run by doctors, at one where midwives are in charge, or at home.
Well, given the fall in the birth rate some of the facilities in the country devoted to birthing do need to be closed, yes.
The wave of closures and suspensions is occurring because of the NHS-wide shortage of midwives, a falling birthrate, the growing complexity of childbirth and a rise in caesarean sections.
Given the increasing age of parturition that non-doctored section of the birthing facilities seems like the logical place to do said cutting. Before we get to that more contentious discussion around how the madwives don’t have all that good a record with delivering healthy children and live mothers.
But what we’re really seeing here is:
The Royal College of Midwives said
Another Lanyard interest group arguing that there should be more for their special interest.
Which is how politics works of course. Shout loud enough, threaten a few votes, and other peoples’ money will be firehosed at your special interest. Which is the problem with the political allocation of funds, obviously. We are indeed aware of the theory that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, government will allocate society’s resources correctly. What actually happens is that those who can cobble together a press release get the money because that’s how political salience is achieved.
And, well, you know, are we absolutely certain that the optimal distribution of society’s resources is achieved by who manages to place an article in the house magazine of the Lanyard Classes?