Via work I receive a booklet (a proper, printed, full colour booklet mind) from ‘Yorkshire and the Humber NHS’ (the Humber being a river containing, so far as I know, no hospitals) about something called ‘Healthy Ambitions’.
A thing called the ‘Yorkshire and the Humber Public Health Workforce Advisory Group’ (i.e. a bunch of people who go to meetings) have analysed this and developed a ‘multi-partner approach with human resources at the core’. All very heartwarming I’m sure though anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation will know the value of HR (i.e. none at all). But anyway, I digress…It says “Language like ‘industrialisation’ has been used to describe this imperative. What this means is a large introduction and embedding of systematic approaches to commissioning and provision of services to facilitate and enable lifestyle and behaviour change”. Even better, ‘a behaviour change workforce competence framework’ has been commissioned from Sheffield Hallam University. Now we all know that nobody speaks like this. We also know that no-one in their right mind can read this stuff. So are the people who produce this sort of language all freaks and weirdos? I suspect not. I suspect that they just learn to pretend that they understand this and that this kind of language is ‘academic’ and using it makes them somehow as clever as all the other people who can’t get an idea across without talking nonsense. We are of course paying for this stuff. I think its about telling people that things like smoking are bad for them. I think the idea is that the people at Sheffield Hallam University (that’s Sheffield Poly to you and me) will think of clever ‘industrialised’ ways of telling people that smoking is bad for them. You could just tell them I suppose but there are no middle class jobs in that.
The thing that makes me mad is that the spongers, timewasters, talkers, meeting junkies and verbal diarrhoea monkeys would all get very cross and defensive if you told them that they were a bunch of sponging layabouts being kept in jobs by the tax paid by the smokers crowding round the hospital gates. Can’t we pay people just to stay at home reading the Guardian? At least that way there’d be no-one who took ‘industrialising behaviour change’ loose on the streets.
At some point in the not too distant I will have to find a new job and the people with the jobs could be these self-same NHS freaks. What am I going to do?
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