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HEALTH SERVICE
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NHS hires £115,000 ‘lived experience’ tsars
EWAN SOMERVILLE
THE NHS has hired an army of “lived experience” tsars on salaries of us to up £115,000, despite ministers vowing to fight a war on waste.
Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT) is recruiting a “director for lived experience” who must have “experience of a life-altering health condition” and “significant power imbalances” in their use of health services. The tsar will “ensure brave spaces” for people to give feedback and be based at St George’s Hospital, in Stafford, on a salary of £110-115,000 per year – four times that of a newly-qualified nurse or junior doctor.
They should also “seek out and heavily involve ‘seldom heard’, under-represented and/or disadvantaged groups” and be a “strategic bridge-builder”, a job advert says.
An NHS source said such power imbalances would include “feeling disempowered, vulnerable and that an individual’s own voice is lost” in using mental or physical health services.
The trust claims it is the first such board-level position in the health service, but The Daily Telegraph has identified at least 20 “lived experience” job titles across seven NHS trusts, being paid a total of at least£600,000.
Last night, the NHS was accused of “inventing problems and creating jobs to solve them”, as a former health minister called for cash to go into direct patient care.
An NHS spokesman said: “[While] the roles [are] not funded nationally, NHS England is working to reduce the number of its own job posts by 30-40 per cent with taxpayers’ money redistributed to fund patient care.”