According to official statistics, NHS bureaucrats are proliferating six times as quickly as nurses. The number of managers went up almost 12% last year, while nurses increased by less than 2% per cent, and the number of health visitors actually fell despite the vast increase in elderly people needing their help. There are now four times as many managers as health visitors.
Since Labour came to power, the number of managers has almost doubled, partly as a result of the need to monitor stringent Whitehall targets on waiting times. Yet Labour's 1997 manifesto promised to “raise spending in real terms every year - and spend the money on patients not bureaucracy”.
The figures come from the NHS Information Centre, and reveal that there are now more than 1.4 million people working in the Health Service, making it one of the largest employers in the world. However productivity has fallen by 3% since 2001, largely because of the increase in staff and over-generous pay awards to senior managers.
These are some of the raw figures: in the last year ...
• The total number of workers in the NHS rose by 4.6%
• The number of qualified nurses rose by 1.9%
• The number of junior doctors rose by 4.7%
• The number of GPs rose by 6.8%
• The number of consultants rose by 5.8%
• The number of midwives rose by only 2.7% (that was 650 new midwives, against a shortfall of over 3,000 in maternity wards across the country)
• The number of health visitors fell by 4.1%
• The number of managers rose by 11.9%
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: 'Increases in the number of NHS managers in the past have supported the service in meeting challenging priorities, including delivering financial turnaround, record low waiting times, improved access to care and the lowest ever rate of healthcare associated infections.'
“I've seen Elvis,” he continued, “the moon is made of cheese and there are fairies up Gordon Brown's bottom.”
Meanwhile, the service from the NHS is crap. Oh yes, I know there will be dozens of Daily Mail readers ready to tell heart-warming stories of how the local hospital cleared up their aunt's bunions, but the fact is, it's total crap. Here's why ...
• we may have “record low waiting times”, but in the real world it still takes months to get to see a specialist and one could easily die in the time it takes to actually get some treatment. An acquaintance went to his GP on the 5th March this year with symptoms suggesting possible bowel or prostate cancer. His appointment with a specialist is not until 26th May.
This is not good enough. If I want my car fixed, the local Renault garage will see to it inside a week. If I need a wasp's nest destroyed, our local pest man (private, not council) will call the very next day. I have three times had to take injured people into hospitals in France. At no time did we wait more than ten minutes. If I'm ill, I'm ill now, and I want to see a doctor now. Anything less is not good enough. Hardened by years of neglect and poor service, most of us seem to have lost sight of how things ought to be.
• the much-trumpeted “financial turnaround” meant that in 2009 the NHS had a surplus of £1.7 billion. This is a service that is funded by the taxpayer for the benefit of the taxpayer, in which funds are meant to be spent on providing the very best healthcare for the taxpayer and his family. Instead, they're squirrelling cash away and letting it sit in bank accounts. Well, I suppose banks have to make a profit - their bonuses have to come from somewhere.
• This “improved access to care” is, as any man knows, a myth. Women get called in to have their tits felt and their bits scraped, but men can just rot as far as NHS preventive medicine is concerned. There is, it is true, a national screening programme for bowel cancer. It was supposed to be up and running by 2009 so that all men over 60 would be tested every two years. In my area at least it hasn't started yet and when I enquired I was told I would probably have to wait another two years. My bottom could have deliquesced and dropped out by then.
There is a phrase that gets bandied about - “well man clinic”. Have any of you ever been to a “well man clinic”? I've never seen or heard of one in my neck of the woods. Five years ago I paid the local private hospital £400 for a “well man check”. It was thorough, efficient, took the best part of a day and included a nice lunch. Money well spent, I thought, and a clean bill of health. Isn't this the kind of service we ought to be expecting from the NHS? Isn't that what it's for, to stop us getting ill?
• The “lowest ever rate of healthcare associated infections” is great to hear about. I'm sure it will come as a great consolation to all the patients and their families at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, which was entirely closed to visitors for some time in January because of an outbreak of a “healthcare associated infection”, and partially closed long before that. Technicians', therapists' and psychiatrists' visits to patients were severely curtailed because of the risk of carrying the infection from ward to ward, and it was only through the kind flexibility (for which read “turning a blind eye”) of ward staff that we were able to visit a relative before he died.
Great service from the NHS, that. Go into hospital to get cured of one illness, and they'll give you another one to go with it.
Buy one, get one free.
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