the best laid schemes o' mice and men...

...gang oft agley! If that made no sense to you whatsoever, it was written by Robert Burns and basically says that the best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong!

I didn't actually have any plans to do anything specific at work today, nothing but the usual day to day stuff that needs to be done in any library. Which was a good thing too as when we got to work this morning there was an email in all of our inboxes that stated that our hospital Trust is now a Foundation Trust.

Which will probably mean little to you if you don't live in the UK, and may not even mean much to you even then!! But the government is encouraging hospital organisations to apply for Foundation Status which means that we have far better control over our own budget and can do far better forward planning (apparently!) amongst other things.

Now, clearly this is good news for the hospital, but, and it is rather a big but, it means that the name of organisation has changed from blah-de-blah NHS Trust to gobble-de-gook NHS Foundation Trust. You will note that it is not even blah-de-blah NHS Foundation Trust - the entire name has changed. Of course the very senior staff can just celebrate in the new name and status....it is the other staff that have to change all the paperwork, check all the websites, update all the email signatures, and generally hunt down all the old names and change them to the new one.

And guess what? That's not all that changes as our email address changes too!!! With immediate effect!! Any mail addressed to us using our old address will continue to be forwarded to us until the end of January 2009, but again it means a heck of a lot of work to the majority of as we tell everyone that our email address has changed as well checking all the library leaflets and paperwork to see what email addresses they have.

I am really pleased that we now have Foundation Status, but please....a bit of warning in future (I mean, we knew that we were applying for it, not that it would happen that quickly) as I printed off about 100 (or more) book labels just last week with the old organisation name on it!!! I would imagine that there were a few people with mixed feelings today - good that it's happened cos it should be good for the hospital, but annoyed that we weren't given a bit more warning!