By

David Craig, on February 1st, 2021
I’m going to continue my break from blogging till Monday 1 March.
But in the meantime here are some brief thoughts about the NHS
Mismanaging the NHS
I’m sure most frontline NHS workers have been doing an excellent job trying to save lives during Xi Pingpong’s Chinese plague that was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the Autumn of 2019. But behind the scenes, it seems that utterly useless NHS management were busy mismanaging the NHS into collapse. Here are just four examples:
1. Fewer hospital beds
I don’t have the exact figures to hand, but if I remember correctly the NHS had almost 300,000 hospital beds around 30 years ago. When Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997 the NHS in England had over 200,000 hospital beds. By the time New Labour were replaced by the Tory/LibDem Coalition, the NHS (England) had just 141,000 beds.
When questioned in 2007 about the dramatic decrease in hospital bed numbers a Department of Health spokesperson explained, ‘bed numbers have fallen because people are being treated much more quickly – spending less time in hospital – and for many conditions medical advances mean they do not need to go to hospital at all’. Moreover the Health Secretary at the time, Patricia Hewitt, claimed that the reduction in the number of hospital beds was a sign of the success of her policies, ‘fewer beds are a sign of success – not of failure’. However, not everybody agreed and the Health Secretary was accused of ‘living on a fantasy planet, far removed from the reality of the frontline cuts that are having a daily adverse impact on NHS staff and patients’.
Not all other countries seem to have thought that having fewer hospital beds was good for a country’s health:

It was Patricia Hewitt who later became the minister for delivering the London Olympics which should have cost taxpayers around £2.4 billion and ended up costing us over £9 billion.
2. Fewer doctors
I don’t fully understand all the details. But I know that changes to the pension rules for NHS consultants and senior staff have had a detrimental impact on staffing levels, especially in A&E departments. These changes resulted in staff turning down additional shifts or even taking early retirement. Thus the NHS both lost some of its most experienced surgeons and those who were left had no incentive to take extra shifts due to draconian taxes they would have to pay.
3. Fewer nurses
Nurses used to be trained in teaching hospitals and I think the training was practical, on-the-job and took about two years. That training has now moved to universities, become much more academic and takes three years. I think that to become a nurse nowadays you actually have to have a degree. At first nurses received bursaries to help cover tuition and living costs. But I believe these have now been scrapped. So a nurse is now likely to start their career with £40,000 to £50,000 of student debt. The starting salary for a newly qualified (Level 5) nurse is about £24,900. As graduates only start repaying their student loans when their salaries hit £25,000, a nurse wouldn’t start repaying their loan immediately. In fact a nurse’s student debt would actually increase every year as the cumulative interest being charged would be greater than the annual repayments. After 30 years, nurses’ student debt would be cancelled with most probably owing over £70,000 by the time their debt is cancelled.
I ain’t no psychologist. But I would have thought that going through the first 30 years of your working life with a debt that starts at around £40,000 to £50,000 and then keeps increasing every year would be a fairly strong disincentive to many people thinking of entering nursing.
4. Ever more managers
The NHS has seen huge cuts in numbers of hospital beds, number of doctors and number of nurses. This has all happened during a time when the NHS’s budget increased in real terms every single year. So, where has all the money gone? There is happily one area where there have been huge increases in the NHS – the number of managers. At the start of New Labour’s terms in in government in 1997 there were 25,000 managers in the NHS (England). By the time of Gordon Brown’s election defeat in 2010, the number of NHS managers had shot up to about 43,000.
So the NHS (England) went from 8 beds per manager in 1997 to about 3.4 beds per manager by 2010. Since then the number of managers has dropped to around 38,000 – still massively above the 25,000 in the NHS (England) in 1997.
I did a ‘back of a fag packet’ calculation and reckon that each 10,000 extra managers cost the NHS over £1bn a year. Then you have to think of all the billions all these managers waste each year through their incompetence. For example, there was over £4bn squandered on a massive computer system that wasn’t necessary and could never work as I explained in one of my books thanks to a whistleblower giving me the truth about the great computer system’s failure.
Conclusion?
Given the above, it’s hardly surprising that we have all been locked in our homes for over a year to save what little is left of the NHS after years of almost unimaginable mismanagement.
I could say more about mismanagement in the NHS as I was married to a cancer surgeon for over 20 years and was briefly an elected governor of my local NHS trust till I resigned in protest against mismanagement there involving the magical disappearance of about £1.5 million that should have been used for patient care. But I’ll keep all that for another day.