Pointless NHS Roles

[ChanelNoFive]

I am an ex-NHS worker. (Department administrator)

Is it unreasonable to think there are so many pointless corporate/non-clinical roles within the NHS. Mainly high up and middle management roles. Examples:

• Events organisers
• Workforce & Organisational Development Leads
• Strategy Leads
• PR/Photographers/Marketing
• Improvement and Culture/Diversity teams
• Roster coordinators
• PMO

Obviously there are non-clinical roles that are essential for the runnings of the NHS. But are a lot of them really needed? I remember seeing all the high up corporate staff thinking “what exactly do you actually do?”

Please stop being ignorant re the future with AI

People said the same BS re the car industry when robots first moved in over 40 years ago and then aeroplanes

I think this is a very relevant point. It's not that all the managers aren't needed (they certainly are), but it's the quality of the people employed. Now that may be linked to pay and conditions, would highly experienced skilled managers want to work for the NHS? Because excellent NHS managers are rare I'm sad to say, and there are probably good reasons for that.
Dh is a hospital consultant and poor managers seriously impede the smooth running of his service.

That's rich coming from you. Your posts are among the most ignorant I have ever seen about medics, their contribution and how they should be treated. AI has its place in medicine and could be transformational in some areas but we still need good human medics.

Meanwhile you can just keep drinking the kool-aid.

I would the same about you as IMO, you are being deliberately obtuse and willfully ignoring the way AI is taking us and not just in the NHS but everything

I don't want to argue with you as its not my style and therefore let you have the last word - but be aware AI is here and here to stay and advance

Take care
ps - your "kool aid drink" comments aimmed at me just show I need to avoid you - goodbye

Can you please cite your evidence that we have more "pen pushers" than other countries? It's not actually true so you may struggle.
Other countries may have better healthcare systems but the number of admin / managers is not to blame.
Another case of 2 + 2 = 5 because of misinformation.

@GoogleWhacking and @Handsan yet another clinical coding fan here! Whilst I am interested in the use of AI on clinical coding, I do think that coders are some of the most underappreciated in the NHS. And yes, they are classed as "admin" 😃

Interesting point re. the quality of coding from private healthcare services. I was involved in a study with collaborators in other countries with private/semi-private healthcare and in some cases they couldn't even tell how many people were admitted to a site due to a stroke.

@DistinguishedSocialCommentator Nobody said that robots could not make cars. Some people pointed out that designing driverless cars is very complex. And we are still not there. The cars we have can not cope with roads with unclear verges, roads without very clear unfaded road markings, and unexpected behaviour such as emergency vehicles.

As a retired NHS HR manager, I will have to disagree with you. Effective recruitment is crucial to ensuring good patient care. Believe me, doctors, nurses and other clinicians want to interview for vacancies but expect the paperwork to be done, references taken up and induction to be dealt with. Administrators deal with this.
Workforce development means that the workforce is reviewed to make sure that there isn’t a massive bulge of retirement. This is what is happening in many trusts. Because the workforce was/is a mystery to managers, there were many gaps in teams such as district nursing, health visiting and other nursing areas.
Do you think that nurses, doctors and AHPs make good administrators? Believe me, they don’t. Do you think that is a good use of their time? No, it’s not.
Should there be better linked IT systems? Of course but these systems can take months and years to write, test and roll out. Members of the public would be pretty quick to sue if their patient records were not kept safely.
Of the many areas which do need review is procurement. If every Trust has its own procurement department and most do, there is little scale and savings. This really needs looking at as a matter of urgency. We all saw what happened during the pandemic. Panicked buying cost us billions.

This wouldn’t work because hospitals don’t offer the same services in the same way.

Agree with you completely. As someone who has worked across the mental health and the acute sector, I can tell you that the complete lack of understanding each sector has of how the other works is beyond belief. Moreover, even within an acute hospital, there are many highly specialist areas where a generic administrator simply will not have the knowledge to provide support efficiently.

I work as a PA in specialist mental health - to do my job, I need extensive knowledge of how mental health social care works, of how the police intersects with mental health services, of the regional systems for secure mental health, of the ways in which eating disorder services are structured and of the linkage between organisations which are involved in support for autism and ADHD. A generic admin in a regional hub will be clueless and therefore inefficient.

This whole thread reeks of contempt for administrators from people who have not walked so much as an inch in our shoes.

I work for the NHS and some jobs are unnecessary but the admin roles are very necessary. I work in an oncology department and it is extremely busy and targets national and trust wise are different from the rest of the hospital. You couldn't do a central admin as every departments objectives are different and targets to meet are very different.

I work in admin for the NHS.

The reason they have to have so many admin staff is because the systems are so outdated using lots and lots of paper. I was shocked when I started there a couple of years ago.

I agree. These roles are normally outsourced to the private sector these days.

I’m guessing you don’t realise that those roles are only part of the person’s job 🙄

Nurses who work in both NHS and private openly say that the bureaucracy in the NHS is ridiculous and that Nuffield is streamlined in the way NHS used to be.

I think this answers both the question and the reason the NHS is a crackpot organisation.

Nuffield employs lots of admin to collect payment. It also charges enough to have enough admin staff.
NHS would be more streamlined if it did not have to deal with sub contracting so many services - forced by various governments.

The Nuffield trust has a lit of managers!! rocketreach.co/nuffield-health-sales-department_b5c64ad9f42e0cb5 and only employs 7600 individuals, it hardly compares to the NHS!! 🤣

@Handsan

You are either doing a terrible job or you just come up with plans and the Government says thank you very much but no! Either way it seems the role is redundant!

Always understaffed and demand always exceeds capacity.

The Nuffield trust has a lit of managers!! rocketreach.co/nuffield-health-sales-department_b5c64ad9f42e0cb5 and only employs 7600 individuals, it hardly compares to the NHS!! 🤣

of course it does but not to the ridiculous state of the NHS. And as I previously stated, it was based on how the nhs used to be, which was all centered on the patient. The NHS has forgotten who they serve. At the moment every NHS employee thinks it’s about them, not the patient.

I attend hospital regularly

The number of receptionists and admin just standing and joking around is a normal occurrence

There is a security guard who literally sits on a chair behind the front desk and either looks lost or just on his phone - it’s crazy

Presumably until someone threatening comes into the hospital?

I imagine you’d be rather grateful for his presence in the Instance that an attacker with a knife runs into the waiting area.

im intrigued to know what you think he should be doing in moments of no threat - randomly throwing patients to the floor in a headlock so he looks like he is doing his job..?

Yes, I've heard this from several different people who work in the NHS. A friend started an admin job there and is proactive and used to pass on documents and info immediately to relevant departments. Her LM actually said woah, this is a day's work. She literally received the reports, printed them out then ran to take them to the wards immediately and they were surprised and appreciated the fast service! It seems it was a case of getting a load and doing it altogether whenever they could be bothered and the recipients never expected them the same day and when asked would roll their eyes. True experience! 👍

There are about 4 other security guards and to be honest without sounding rude he doesn’t look like he could take anyone down

PMO: how else will projects get off the ground, spend doesn’t get out of control, the right resources are allocated and there is proper governance in place to ensure controls? I am biased of course, I work in PMO 😉

@Jeannie88 my experience of an NHS admin job is too much work to do for the number of staff.