In the BBC East Midlands Today [1] report on Peter Reading's sudden "retirement", they managed to caption my brief segment as "Ian Holden" - so I guess that might confuse someone in the HR department if they try to reprimand me for criticising the UHL Trust Board...

The story looks likely to rumble on for a while. The Leicester Mercury are reporting that Dr Reading will receive a "golden handshake" of around £750,000 - which is outrageous when compared with the struggle union representatives have had trying to secure redundancy payments for staff who are being told they have to be redeployed into lower grade jobs when their posts are made redundant.

The difference in treatment between ordinary NHS staff - who don't get asked to "retire" when they disappoint their managers but face disciplinary action and dismissal without pay - and Dr Reading, who will get a leaving present worth the equivalent of 37 nurses' annual salary, and is described as "retiring to spend more time with his family" - is very stark.

I can't go along with the patient groups who are saying "Peter Reading was a wonderful, and he made our hospitals great, so he shouldn't have been asked to retire". For one thing, Peter Reading may have been an excellent communicator, and a good ambassador for the UHL, but his record on the major change issues at UHL is not actually that great - the Pathway scheme was a disaster, they've done nothing to address the continued use of private contractors to lower price (and thus quality) on cleaning, catering and other Facilities Management services within the hospitals, he approved the switch to Capita for payroll services to save money, and he has driven forward the cuts agenda, leading to ward closures and job losses, both clinical and non-clinical.

Peter Reading is being described as "responsive", which I can see would make him popular with patients' groups. For instance, he has personally pressed for the changes in catering for the children's cancer ward at the LRI, in response to families of patients complaining that their food is inadequate. But the hundreds of thousands now being spent on developing kitchens and employing chefs will only serve patients on one ward - what about the quality of catering for all the other children in hospital? And what happens when the charity money runs out, once the story is not flavour of the week at the Leicester Mercury? Will nursing jobs go to pay for the chefs?

For staff at the UHL the future does now seem bleak. The collapse of Pathway is the result of a fundamental shift in power in NHS financial operation away from acute hospitals to the PCTs. The PCTs have already pulled the plug on a number of acute services, both in mental health (leading to Leicestershire Partnership Trust having to close units and shut beds) and in medicine (most notoriously, slashing medical rehabilitation from ward 18 at the LGH without putting any suitable service into place in the community to take over care of the patients). And now the PCTs are running the review to determine
what should happen instead of Pathway. If there's any conflict between the clinical needs of Leicestershire's people and the financial resources available to the two PCTs, and there almost certainly will be, it's clear which way the review will go.

Peter Reading was not a superhero. But his departure probably does weaken still further the relative position of the UHL. UNISON will be calling for a replacement to be found immediately.