Rex Kramer wrote:They key point for me in Sunaks back of an envelope national service policy is the helping out in the community. It's just a cheap way to get (unskilled) labour in services that have been hollowed out by 14 years of Tory underfunding.
I've worked in several NHS services that used volunteers - in my current role they were all clinically vulnerable so we sent them home during Covid and ended up not bringing them back (for reasons from above I do not know).
The roles they could perform were very limited - they had no clinical training so to speak and in many cases in the most recent role I mentioned above they had disabilities that meant they couldn't do much more than greeting patients and doing some light admin. In London we had more able bodied people who could do more complex roles mixed with some younger kids - but they all wanted to go to medical school so it was basically work experience for them. This was important and valuable for us (and for them) but flooding the workplace with a hundred untrained eighteen year olds on secondment for a couple of months isn't going to help any public service. At all. If my house is burning down I don't want little Declan who'd rather be at barber college trying to connect the hose to the water main!
Another point is the motivation. You don't get good work out of people who are being forced to be there, and a lot of the "menial" work (that you don't need significant formal training for and you could do fairly soon after starting) is absolutely vital. Don't book that appointment properly on PIMS Olivia? Sorry Fred, you didn't get that follow up for your macular degeneration treatment and you're irreversibly blind! Didn't clean that toilet properly Callum? Sorry Doris, you've got a fatal case of MRSA! Not to mention the potential liability under the Computer Misuse Act and GDPR of letting strawberry floating morons access NHS computer systems.
