To think the NHS is bloated with unnecessary management while frontline staff - doctors and nurses - are overworked and overpaid?

With my OH's cancer and chemotherapy drug fiasco, he has to speak to several "admins" along the way between booking his blood test through to telling the dept the date he's due to start (cos they're incapable of working out a start date 4 weeks since the last start date), then phoning someone else to tell them he needs the drugs to be available at the hospital pharmacy 2 days before he starts, then the pharmacy to tell them to expect the prescription and to hold them in the pharmacy rather than sending them heaven knows where to some random hospital to be picked up and finally on the pick up day itself, phoning the pharmacy to check they're there and have been "approved" via the secondary controlled drug approval system, to be told they havn't, for him to phone another "admin" to give them a kick up the backside to press the "approve" button on the controlled drug system, to phone back the pharmacy to check it's showing on their system. That's a lot of phone calls to numerous "admin" people who are mostly completely incompetent. This happens every sodding month. It's exactly the same routine every 4 weeks for the past 4 years, yet every month they act like it's something new that they've not seen before and he has to talk them through every step of the way. Some months, it all goes tits up and he has to get the cancer specialist nurses onto the case - so poor admin is making the specialist nurses spend their time knocking heads together rather than actually being hands on with cancer patients - once it took the nurse a whole afternoon to sort it out - they'd have done it quicker without the crap admin staff having to be involved. I think there's a real case for far fewer admin/management staff but recruit better quality - i.e. quality rather than quantity.

Yes, no one likes talking about this because it makes it sound like people are to blame for not dying, but the reason the NHS takes more and more money to do the same is an ageing population. I had a serious eye injury and almost everyone at the ophthalmology clinic was over 80, many older. Many of them were there for sight-saving procedures - this was a clear and real need. It was also a level of need for that service that just did not exist a few decades ago.

It feels impossible to win on this. People only want NHS money spent on doctors and nurses, but they also don't want doctors and nurses wasting their time doing the administration. One of the reasons that frontline staff are so stretched is that they are doing functions like bed management that shouldn't sit with them.

Completely agree. I have a few friends high up in random management roles within the nhs. All paper pushing. Nothing of real value

I’m nearly 70 - OMG the string of operations/ scans/ ulteasounds/ resections/ docs appointments, routine clinic checkups / physio etc and on and on and on that people my age and older receive is unbelievable-I can see exactly where all the money goes.

I thought there was a study done showing that what the nhs needed was more management not less, and that the lack of management resulted in a bullying culture. I’ll see if I can find it.

Might want to check the thread title

This post is about 20 years out of date. This all started with the Sainsbury Review, then by Alan Lansley when he was in charge of the DoH

underpaid?

Yes, but I think the key word is unnecessary management. There are some management staff whose role I would question.
More admin staff are probably needed to give clinical staff more time for clinical duties.

I was a consultant in the NHS previously. I did spend a fairly large part of week dealing with issues with issues an administrator could have done, which would have enabled me to spend more time with patients.
I work overseas now and have much more administrative support.

I agree with you but you’ll get a truck load of butthurt middle managers and people with non-jobs coming on to sulk.

I’ve worked in the NHS. There are SO many pointless non-clinical roles. The NHS doesn’t need internal communications officers on £35k a year to send staff “Thank you” postcards and put out a newsletter nobody reads