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Monday, December 30, 2002The National Health Service now has so many levels of bureaucracy that there are more administrators than hospital beds. Official figures reveal that for the 199,670 beds currently available there are now 211,650 staff classed as managers, administrators or clerks ˜ an all-time high. Critics blame ministers‚ obsession with target- setting for the rise. The growth of administrators employed to monitor NHS performance and progress towards the government's 300 targets, has seen the bureaucracy grow by almost 12,000 in the past year alone. Figures released to Tim Loughton, the shadow health minister, show the number of senior NHS managers more than doubled in the past decade to 27,000, while the number of beds fell by almost 59,000. “It is ridiculous. You cannot get through a morning‚s work without being interrupted by someone with a clipboard asking silly questions,” said a consultant at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham which has more than 1,300 administrators for its 1,000 beds. (Thanks to a reader who must have subscription to the Sunday London Times) More Consequences: And a lot of those administrators and appointees are of one political mind: Some 599 – or 21.9 per cent of all appointees – were Labour, while 143 or 5.3 per cent were Tories, and 111 or 4.1 per cent were Liberal Democrats. Liam Fox, the shadow Health Secretary, said there was still a "blatant bias" in favour of Labour. "It is everything to do with subservience to the party first, with a sense of duty to the local community a very distant second," he said. ...Dame Rennie Fritchie, the Commissioner for Public Appointments, issued a scathing report that described NHS appointments as "politicised in a systemic way". She said political allegiance had been the "decisive factor" in the selection of a number of candidates as Frank Dobson, the former health secretary, sought to counter years of perceived Tory "cronyism" on trust boards. Between January 1998 and March 1999, the number of councillors on trust boards more than doubled, with 80 per cent being awarded to Labour supporters. Another good reason to avoid both politicizing medicine and government-run healthcare systems. posted by Sydney on 12/30/2002 08:07:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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