David Craig, on August 6th, 2015Many NHS trusts are in financial difficulties. Several are bankrupt. The cause? Usually the around £229bn of ludicrously expensive and mouth-wateringly profitable 30-year PFI contracts Gordon Brown used to build new hospitals while pretending he wasn’t spending more than he took in tax.
There are many (far too many?) NHS regulators wasting billions of our money each year. One of these is called Monitor. Monitor was originally set up to control which hospitals deserved to become NHS trusts and to regulate their performance. But the empire-building bosses at Monitor seem to have managed to expand their role to covering every aspect of healthcare: “As the sector regulator for health services in England, Monitor’s job is to make the health sector work better for patients.” Yet there are around ten other supposed ‘regulators’, costing us billions each year, all claiming to do pretty much the same thing.
A couple of days ago, Monitor issued an instruction to financially-squeezed NHS trusts to cut recruitment and only recruit urgently needed front-line medical staff. Seems like pretty good advice? Yup?
But have the useless bureaucrats at Monitor stuck to their own advice on spending control? Well, not exactly. Monitor’s spending on its own penpushers rocketed from just £20,757,000 in 2010/11 to an astonishing £64,293,000 in 2013/14:
Ooops! Remember, all this massive increase in spending occurred during years of so-called ‘austerity’.
And what about staff numbers? Monitor seem to have excelled themselves there too. These shot up from 148 in 2010/11 to 424 in 2013/14 and are expected to hit 494 this year:
Double ooops! I thought Monitor were advising NHS trusts to only employ essential medical staff. Yet Monitor are wasting millions on ever more over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats.
Oh, and talking about pay, if you want a big wad of money each year, Monitor is the place to work. The average cost per employee there (salary, national insurance and pension) is a whopping £78,568.
So, please don’t believe the howling and moaning of the professional handwringers as they wail about the NHS needing ever more of our money. The NHS gets in real terms about twice as much as it did when New Labour started hosing our money onto it. The NHS is awash with our money. But much of our money is being squandered on ever-increasing armies of useless over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats.
If any reader knows people working in the NHS, they might find yesterday’s and today’s blogs interesting, amusing, or even infuriating?
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Not really relevant but today I am bombarded on radio and TV by a bunch whinging japs that seem to think I should somehow feel guilty because the allies dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on them 70 years ago, which is the only reason they eventually surrendered.
Well get stuffed you buck toothed yellow devils, hell will freeze over before I feel anything but great joy when I see the footage of these bombs going off and the empire of the sun being blown into kingdom come.
If the stupid, evil, murdering bastards that made up the japanese military and government had not started their evil wars of conflict in the first place then our chaps would not have had to drop bombs on the evil scum in question.
My dad was out there fighting Japs at that time counting the days before he was killed as so many of his mates had been.
If it was not for these bombs, he might have got killed and I would not be writing this comment.
So what would you rather have folks ?, me or a couple of hundred thousand japs who were the Muslims of their day ??
So back to the TV and radio,,,,Not one word of apology from these slant eyed shits who seem to think they were wronged because we did not allow them to impose murder and slavery over the whole of Asia, who raped and murdered with impunity and who still revere their poxy little emperor who recently visited a memorial to japanese railway engineers who died while building the “railway of death” with slave labour in Burma & Thailand.
Tojo, take a hike !!