NHS England to go is Keir being unreasonable?

[43percentburnt]

I don’t work for the NHS but have friends who do (and are increasingly looking at leaving - in some cases to move abroad).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx29lrl826rt

Is the removal of NHS England a good thing? Or is this a Labour gimmick?

To include an Aibu for Keir -

Yes Keir - you are being unreasonable

Or

Good job Keir, please get rid of NHS England - you are NOT being unreasonable

Everyone I’ve ever known who’s worked for the NHS, from surgeon to admin, had said that there are far too many managers, and a shocking amount of waste.

It's a great thing that NHS England are to go. Good effing riddance. I worked for a local authority (in one of the poorest boroughs) for many years, every week there was a meeting between senior social care staff and NHS 'managers'. They came in, talked about issues, wrote up the odd report which no one ever read and got paid an absolute fortune. Each meeting would be attended by 2 or 3 managers, each earning around 60k. Honestly, it's a cushy job if you can get it..

You can fund as many doctor training places as you want, you need the capacity amongst the senior clinical workforce to train them. The capacity isn’t there unless we are willing to cut productivity (appointments, surgery etc) further.

Money will be saved on management positions but Im not certain it will translate into higher productivity.

I worked on a campaign years ago (maybe 2012?) to highlight the awful idea that was the Lansley plan to divest responsibility for all of it. It was clear then that it would turn into a convoluted mess.

But what does wind me up is the rhetoric of 'checkers and blockers' to talk about people who are just doing a job and are now in the dark about what happens to that job. Same as shirkers, skivers - it is a vile way to talk about the complexities and nuances of work, people and life. Yes blame the system but lay off the attacks on people. Expected better but increasingly seeing the folly of that.

I agree, people are just trying to do their jobs. Most were employed to do the checking and blocking for which they are now criticised.

Also worth remembering that this is the first that all those NHS England employees are hearing about it, as there was no warning. Shitty.

My husband works for NHSE, obviously we have no idea if his job will be safe or not so it’ll be a hugely anxious time in our household. I don’t necessarily disagree with the decision, but it could end in chaos if it’s not carried out properly and is more of a slash and burn “DOGE” style cutting. I’m also NHS but am a senior manager in a health board - one of the jobs I’m sure plenty of you would deem unnecessary and that my salary should be taken off me and turned into band 5 posts. I do however play an important role in governance, assurance and service development, basically I make sure services are safe, patient care is high quality, safe and accessible, and we develop our services to meet patient need. Not everyone who isn’t a frontline nurse (or midwife) is a waste of space in the NHS, so I have mixed feelings about the overall message of cutting NHSE.

Not everyone in NHSE is an overpaid manager, I work in admin and get a lot less than the average wage

That’s probably because he announced this at Reckitt in Hull, where on Monday 100 staff were given “at risk” status for redundancy out of the blue. Lots of unhappy workers there

Not everyone in NHSE is a “manager”? My husband is a band 5, his job is highly stressful and actually does mean something. Really disappointed in a lot of the rhetoric in this thread - NHSE is not entirely made up of “lazy managers” getting paid “cushy” £60k+ salaries. 7500 people at least are going to lose their jobs, people seem to be almost gleeful about that.

Radical change is needed but I’m aware that there will be very anxious waits for many people now. I do not feel sorry for NHSE staff who’ve been coasting on £60k pa of public money but they’re in the minority I’m sure. I hope that the useful hard workers find suitable roles.

Sorry to anyone worried about jobs, it's such lazy rhetoric to go down the 'wasteful managers' road, it's trotted out every time. Of course there is waste and being more efficient is essential but play the ball not the man/woman etc

This all feels a bit familiar, having lived through Eric Pickles’ et al’s ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’ in 2010 ish (?) I was on a training contract with the Audit Commission when it was abolished in 2012 as ‘bloated and unnecessary’ and look what’s happened to local government audit and accounting since - the Whole of Government Accounts have just been qualified (ie not given a clean audit opinion) for the first time ever due to lack of accurate financial information resulting from years long delays in finalising local government accounts, due to lack of sufficiently experienced finance staff in both local authorities themselves and their auditors. And they are now talking about setting up another body to oversee local government accounting (hollow laugh)

We used to audit PCTs and then CCGs (full of the same people, in a slightly different arrangement) and while there is I’m sure some
inefficiency, the jobs they do need doing! DH is a GP and he’s trained to practice medicine, not deal with commissioning and contracts and staff and leases and supply chains and so on and so on - if there were only clinical staff the NHS would collapse extremely quickly!

it sounds like a very good idea to me. It was created in 2011 as part of NHS reforms that actually made the NHS less efficent

What does he actually do? I bet there’s an equivalent in DHSC doing exactly the same thing. The fact is that we’re paying 7,500 people who never see a patient in an organisation that costs £2 billion a year. It’s wasteful and unaffordable. Having worked in roles in Trusts where so much time is spent “feeding the beast” of bureaucracy, I think retaining a wasteful bureaucracy is madness.

I know someone who works for the ICB and has very little to do

Not a terrible idea in and of itself but the execution has been appalling. People will have found out they are at risk of losing their job via the media and that is cruel. It will take months of planning to make that level of job cuts and to abolish the national body responsible for the NHS. They should have done the planning first to understand what functions should be kept and where and how it would work. Now they’ve thrown a grenade into the system before they have answers so people will be worried about their jobs and managing restructure rather than the day job.

I have no skin in the game but it is too easy to blame management for problems and arbitrarily sack people who you later realise were quite important. There will be experienced staff queuing up for lucrative redundancy payments so the system will lose the experienced people at high cost.

Obviously it depends what happens in reality, but the decision makes perfect sense to me.

I am not gleeful. But NHSE should never have been set up in the first place. As pp said the duplication of work with DHSC is absurd. I really hope people will be redeployed rather than made redundant.

I'm really on the fence with this and I'm currently asking around friends and family who are frontline NHS staff.

As a principle, I am averse to direct political interference in public services. While I would consider the NHS safer in Labour hands, I can also foresee a time in the future where too much political control may be a very bad thing. I think police authorities were more effective than police and crime commissioners. I think that giving the Bank of England autonomy in setting interest rates was also a good move. So I'm struggling to reconcile these beliefs with KS's announcement. I don't know enough about the effectiveness or otherwise of NHS England to form an opinion.

I do think there's an incredible amount of progress slowing bureaucracy in these organisations that needs urgently addressing, but I'm not sure this is the way to do it. And I say this as a lifelong Labour voter.

As a principle, I am averse to direct political interference in public services. While I would consider the NHS safer in Labour hands, I can also foresee a time in the future where too much political control may be a very bad thing

NHSE only came into being in 2012/13. Before then, its functions were carried out by DHSC. Now those functions are being returned to DHSC. Starmer is basically putting control back to where it has always historically been.

I dont have high hopes that the health service will improve or that it will save money. Will the NHS engalnd staff just get absorbed into the rest of the NHS (unions permitting)?

NHSE run the national IT systems for NHS App, electronic prescriptions, screening, NHS.UK website and much more.

same staff will continue to do the same work under DH.

The Bank of England haven't exactly covered themselves in glory either

At last! Please make local NHS Trusts next, and make it truly 'national' again!