If you accept the NHS diverges,
Into ‘Medical’, and ‘Management’, two scions,
Where the crusts you earn, unlike the honest nurses’,
Are oft dark ones, kept for ‘donkeys leading lions’;

If you choose spin, but baulk never at lying,
Should your integrity amount to none;
Or withdraw care from patients who are ‘dying’
On naught but unsafe ‘feel’ they’ll soon be gone;

If you can see no moral obligation
To act with honour and with honesty
And tell the truth, dependent on your station,
But hide behind lack of humanity;

If you deny each separate new blunder,
Hang not your head in shame when bluff’s believed;
Conceal the truth by rending it asunder,
And fret not, for the people you deceive;

If you can turn away from middling matters,
Such as conscience, such as guilt, and shut them out;
Withhold the facts by tearing them in tatters,
No time for those who quibble, or who doubt;

If strictly binding guidelines you have flouted
Are routinely brushed aside with scornful bluster;
If you can wriggle, squeal and squirm each time thus outed,
Yet lay claim to what of credence you can muster;

If you’ve misled, caused harm or aberrated,
But spend your life in total self-denial
And let yourself continue to be feted,
Relying on your trickery and guile;

If you can make complainants rue the wisdom
Of putting pen to paper, in all trust;
Have the juggernaut inherent in ‘the System’
Roll over them, at will, and leave them crushed;

If, in answer to real trauma, you’ll impart
Health bodies’ rank evasions, by the page;
Care not as to the number of the smart
Alecks and ‘erstwhile experts’ you’ll engage

If you can count on management protection
To save your skin when wrongdoing’s revealed;
And scoff aloud at Joe Public’s suggestion
Your disciplinary fate is somehow sealed;

If you just get overlaid ”’official versions”’
Of ”’misinterpretations”’, quite sufficient to dismiss you;
Ignored whistles, claims, reports and all assertions;
Or provided answers to a totally different issue;

If you can twist rules as and when occasioned,
Reject accountability and right
With stealth and nerve increasingly embrazened
For lack of regulatory oversight;

If it’s not amiss when your service provider’s
Care arrangements have been irresponsibly maintained;
If it’s fine to retain miscreants and skivers,
And incompetents, who’ve failed to use their brain;

If you’ve the wherewithal to keep bemusing
Litigators, who are not happy (as Larry);
And can dredge up grounds for wrongfully excusing
The guilty antics of each Tom (or Dick, or Harry)

If you can fend off Press, withstand all volleys
(Such as havoc overspilling A & E,
Inertia around care confined to trolleys
And ambulances, stacked up endlessly);

                    —————- 

Well…if you’re that wolf, attired in sheep’s apparel,
But masquerading as an open book;
Or what’s found at the bottom of the barrel,
Contaminating oaths that you’ve forsook…

If you can do all this…then persevere,
Evade justice and exposure – but fear not;
Your contract is still safe, year upon year,
You’re the only bloody NHS they’ve got

(And if these verses should reflect your own face
As clearly as the mirror in your hand,
For defamation cases there is no place,
Just the pricking of your conscience to withstand…)