from 'livid in Lilongwe'

My warm and fuzzy feelings from the start of the workshop rapidly disappeared by lunchtime when I took delivery of the CPD booklets that we'd had printed to help guide and record everyone's CPD activities in during the pilot project. They were dreadful, so disapointing, and so I couldn't help myself but write a stern letter...

Dear Mr B Alls-up,

RE: CPD books for Nurses and Midwives Council of Malawi

I am writing to express my disappointment in the quality of the products we have received from your company.

Many of the CPD booklets were unstapled, leaving the pages free to fall out; some had pages that were inserted upside down and others had printing ink running across the text. However, these issues are minor compared to the changes in the content and design that were noted when the booklets were checked before being distributed to the participants of the training workshop.

It appears that unapproved editing and other changes to the layout have been made which has resulted in instructions from the LogBook failing to correspond with the information in the GuideBook. The spacing of the text in the LogBook has been altered leaving unsightly and incorrect gaps between the words, in the GuideBook, the contents page has been changed, lists of nursing skills have been re-ordered and a table listing the CPD points allocation printed on Page 11 had the vital column titles missing rendering the information useless. Several boxes round the italic text in the Self Assessment tool have been removed, the index has also lost the page number information and the way that the LogBook and GuideBook were written (i.e with a capital B within the word) has been changed despite this having been this way for a reason. It also appears that errors were made on the front covers of some documents and covered up with an star shape which would have been fine apart from the careless application of the glue.

A hard copy of both books, displaying how the NMCM wished the printed versions to look like, were submitted to you along with the soft copies of the document in the Microsoft publisher application. I understand that there might have been a few editing changes once you had loaded the files into your system but the designs should have been checked against the copies sent from us before being printed or at least approved by the NMCM before our order was completed.

The delivery of these sub-standard documents is unacceptable and has caused considerable disruption to the launch of an important NMCM activity. The Council would appreciate if you would rectify the situation as promptly as possible, re-editing the documents so that they correspond exactly to our original designs. In order to facilitate this process I have again printed and bound the booklets as we would like them to appear. In the documents you sent I have highlighted the errors that require your attention.

The NMCM will return the box of books to you and we ask that you make the required changes and print 1 version of each book to be returned to us by Friday 26th June. Once we have verified the quality, we shall contact you to confirm that printing may take place.

Yours sincerely,

Livid in Lilongwe