IN the hunt for the NHS misspent millions, the media blames the management or the politicians. Yet, these professional cynics are getting things wrong again in attributing blame.
In fact even their solutions of giving power back to the nurses and doctors would make things worse for the NHS. It is simply ridiculous to suggest that the medical staff have the management skills needed to run an organisation which has an £87bn budget, has an economy equivalent to Austria, is the 33rd biggest economy in the world, and which employs over 1.3m people (as large as China’s armed forces).
There is also the media’s oft recited cry that the managers are not doing their job and that private sector management would be more effective. Given the cost overruns and construction delays in projects like the Channel Tunnel, the West Coast Main Line and the yet-to-be completed Wembley stadium, it is hard to take seriously this suggestion. Ironically, the business sector has often had to go to central government to bail it out from its mistakes - often on a scale much larger than the relatively minor current deficit in the NHS.
Another criticism that opponents of the NHS put forward is that the government places undue emphasis on setting targets such as cutting waiting lists and hospital league tables. This is curious because it is difficult to identify any business organisation, even a newspaper proprietor, which does not, at the beginning of its financial year, use a performance related targeting system. Any sensible business would set targets such as projected turnover, profitability, sales, productivity, market share, and of course, the directors' and chairman's performance bonuses!
To suggest that an £87bn organisation like the NHS should not utilise normal business type techniques is verging on 'cloud cuckoo land'. It is curious that the media’s often quoted refrain, that the Continent provides a higher standard of health care, has become muted now that the NHS has achieved its target of being one of the leading premier healthcare providers in Europe.
Finally, only a few years ago, there was the usual media
clamor about the shortage of doctors, consultants and nursing staff. Remember all the stories about our doctors emigrating to the USA, because of the high remuneration etc? We don’t hear a word of it in today’s newspapers, do we? The position is reversed because now all the media bleats about is that the NHS's efforts in training have resulted in a surplus of medical professionals. Admittedly some of this has been achieved by, as Bevan put it in 1948, “stuffing the mouths of doctors with gold.”
One final point can be addressed to the media; please stop making front page headlines about a drunken lout who has to wait five minutes before getting treated in A&E on a Saturday night. The NHS is a massive organisation; even a Private in the Chinese army may forget to make his bed!
