MY time spent managing people taught me that high morale in the workforce is worth a great deal. Staff with their chins up will outperform a demoralised group every time and bring benefits to their employer and those being served in a myriad ways.

Having stated this, I now invite you to put yourself in the shoes of a nurse working in an NHS hospital today. In March 2014, the Treasury announced that all NHS employees could receive only a paltry one per cent pay rise and the pay of the top managers in the NHS would see their pay frozen.

Despite this statement, the news has now leaked out, thanks to an investigation by journalists, that NHS hospital bosses are receiving salary rises that in some cases are as high as £35,000. Forty per cent of hospital trusts increased the pay of the chief executives by at least £5,000 per annum. Upon receiving this information, what is the likely effect going to be upon your morale?

Perhaps this question has been best answered already by the head of the Royal College of Nursing who has been quoted as saying it was “immensely demoralising to find that some executives have been awarded rises larger than the full year’s salary for the average nurse.”

If nurses and the other members of NHS hospital staff are not demoralised I would argue that they have good cause to be so.

It is no secret that the NHS is in serious financial trouble and it seems that overspent hospital budgets are in evidence in many parts of the UK. The Government has pledged more money to deal with the crisis but I hope that at the same time that this extra cash is released from the Treasury there will be an in depth investigation into why the overspends are happening.

To begin with, surely someone in Whitehall should be asking the Secretary of State to account for why the Treasury statement in March 2014 has been ignored and NHS executive pay has not been frozen. Are the NHS hospitals really a law unto themselves with the audacity to hold out their hands for more cash even when they have so blatantly gone against Treasury policy?

I anticipate that the hospital boards guilty of significantly increasing executive salaries will argue that they have done so in order to attract and retain the services of top quality managers. However, when one looks more closely at who is getting paid what, it is nothing short of scandalous to see that in many cases the larger salary rises are going to chief executives in trusts that are performing very badly. This is not based on my opinion but a fact that can be substantiated by examining the reports of inspectors monitoring the performance of the trusts. It is therefore of little surprise that Katherine Murphy, the chief executive of the Patient’s Association, has accused the NHS of developing a culture of rewarding failure.

When we as a nation were first facing up to economic crisis that we were told would require drastic cuts and belt tightening in many areas of life, there was a phrase bandied about by politicians that encouraged us all to see ourselves as “all being in this together”.

These were words meant to make us all pull together but what I can see happening in the NHS is divisive in the extreme. We need NHS staff at all levels who know how highly we value them and that this is reflected in their pay and in all the other conditions that apply to their employment.