The availability of public services is failing, and in the long run it is a sad thing for the whole society.
“I I’m telling you now: Helsinki is messed up.”
The answer will certainly surprise you. I have called the number of one of the city’s healthcare services and asked about the queue situation on behalf of a loved one.
The employee, who was revealed to be furiously honest, says that help is not available in any reasonable time. Unless you slyly try to talk yourself out of the passing lane by citing extreme urgency.
In another city, the afternoon club at the playground is closed with three weekdays’ notice because the kindergartens are running out of staff. In a neighboring municipality, a pensioner with knee problems has been waiting for an artificial joint replacement for ages.
Of the public there are now all sorts of unpleasant things about the services, also on a general level: there are not enough employees and the medical debt is increasing.
At least poor working conditions, bad management and the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic have been mentioned as reasons.
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Isn’t it worth waiting for something good?
The nurses’ working conditions are getting a clear improvement with the recent salary agreement. So one could imagine that employees will not abandon the industry en masse.
On the other hand, the growing wage costs will strain the public finances in the coming years, which are already badly in deficit. The population pyramid stands on its tip to tell about the increase in the number of people receiving care and the thinning of the ranks of payers. From an international point of view, Finland is once again an outlier on the edge of the world.
How about then, even if the future is scarcer? Isn’t it worth waiting for something good?
A friend of public services should be worried. The driving force behind the welfare state is the confidence of middle-class citizens that they get a lot of good things in exchange for a relatively generous tax payment. So you don’t have to think about how you can afford daycare and education for your children or how your own or a loved one’s illness could destroy the economy.
If services become available only in theory, the joy may disappear from the faces of taxpayers.
In the coming years, the state, municipalities and the new welfare regions will live in a tight economic situation. I hope that at least during next spring’s parliamentary elections, we will hear what conclusions the parties draw from this.
If you rely on savings, you should remember the cheese-planing option, i.e. defining the most important services and managing them properly. It would be nice to know in which matters you can rely on public authority and which needs you have to solve on your own.
The author is the development manager of Helsingin Sanomat.
#Column #employee #Helsinki #messed
