With its traditional members all about to lose their jobs to India, and the new wave of HR executives disillusioned with it because they can’t get fellowship status, Guru is delighted to see the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development still has time to weigh in on football matters.
Assistant director-general Duncan Brown last week spoke at length on the pressing need for Luton Town Football Club manager Mike Newell to referee a woman’s football match. It was important for the former Blackburn striker “to learn both how difficult the official’s job is and how rapidly the standard of women’s football in this country is improving”, said Brown.
Guru was scratching his head for exactly how these issues fell under the institute’s remit, until he looked a little closer at the Newell comments that so angered it. It seems the Luton manager referred to the use of female referees as “tokenism for the politically correct idiots”. Obviously the CIPD felt qualified to answer back on behalf of the ‘idiots’.
Survival of the fattest
Talking of token gestures, Guru stumbled on the ‘big story’ in the West Midlands and couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sadness for those in the NHS who have lost their jobs in recent months.
Apparently, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust has invested huge sums procuring equipment to give patients a bit of a lift.
It seems that the West Midlands is the home of the UK’s fattest women and, as such, the hospital felt duty-bound to invest vast wads of cash to move ‘physically challenged’ patients around the hospital.
In fact, it’s forked out more than £150,000 on two cranes, super-sprung beds and reinforced trolleys, while at the same time laying off some 800 staff to cut its £6m deficit.
With the NHS allegedly committed to making the nation healthier, it strikes Guru as strange to be encouraging our fat friends by laying on a big spread of fatilities sorry facilities. Surely, for that cash, a few nurses could have kept their jobs – and got fit by lugging the clubsters around?
Of course, unless the trust invests in double-height, double-width openings in the door department, our portly chums are not going to fit into the hospital to avail themselves of these super-size assets.
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Fatnote: Guru noticed that the new equipment inventory included oversize fridges. At first he thought they were for the larger inmates’ super-size salads. But it turns out the cold-storage devices are only for fat fatalities. Clearly forward-thinking, but not exactly inspiring for any larger-than-average in-patients expecting to leave in a taxi rather than a black bag (BS459 reinforced).
