The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #92228 Message #1760560
Posted By: mandotim
15-Jun-06 - 08:56 AM
Thread Name: BS: UK An NHS Story
Subject: RE: BS: UK An NHS Story
I worked in the NHS for nearly 20 years; trotting out the old adage about 'too many administrators' doesn't hold water, but most people who do it don't want to be bothered with the facts. Here's a few;
Most successful large commercial organisations spend between 11 and 14 percent of their total paybill on management and administration. The NHS spends less than 7 percent, from which it is possible to conclude that the service is undermanaged, not overmanaged. When did you last complain about too many managers at Tesco? (Incidentally, the like-for-like figure for the oft-admired commercially driven health system in the USA is close to 19 percent.)
The NHS is a huge and highly complex organisation, employing over a million staff. In the 1980's a large number of managers were drafted in from private industry to 'sort out' the NHS. Hardly any of them survived, as they were unable to make the transition from the relative simplicity of the pursuit of profits to the complexity of an organisation where every individual patient is a product line in themselves. NHS managers are by and large highly skilled, and in my experience work far harder than their industry counterparts (I worked in industry for 10 years too)
Again in the 1980s; the government of the day ran a campaign to strip out administrative staff; the biggest consequence was that Ward Clerks work is now done by relatively highly paid nurses, who are taken away from their prime function of caring for patients.
In any organisation the size of the NHS, things will go wrong; no system is perfect. It is easy to make a huge fuss about each and every error, giving the impression that the service is in some kind of permanent crisis. The truth is that most commercial chief executives would sell their grandmother for the kind of efficiency and effectiveness that the NHS provides. Good news is no longer news thanks to the massed ranks of cynical, under-employed English graduates posing as serious journalists in the UK.
The UK is near the bottom of the list of developed nations in terms of the proportion of GDP we spend on health care. The vast bulk of the money is spent on front-line care (e.g. 60% of the pay bill is spent on nurses alone.) Looked at like this, the NHS starts to look like a bargain.
Rant mode off, back to being a peaceful academic.
Tim