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

YABU not to include a poll.

NHS England probably needed to go.

@Alexandra2001

You're quoting another poster, you mean @GasPanic

Or if not no idea what you're referring to

@GoodOldTrayBake

If that Independent article is accurate then it may have been a clever move by Blair to start using the term Task Force if years later we are saying we see Task Forces as different to Quangos? Doesn’t a task force sit outside the relevant government department too?

That inde article makes it seem that task forces are ‘jobs for the boys’. It would be interesting to see who is in each of the task forces and how much they get paid.

@borntobequiet

i know - I thought I had! I even contacted MN HQ but they can’t add it 🥲

Yes he definitely copied what Elon has done.

My partner works for ICB and they have saved the NHS money (£££ millions) by working on different projects and helping health inequalities. Don’t want to be too specific for confidentiality reasons.

Now everyone can only think about where to find their next job.

I think cutting jobs and claiming "efficiency savings" will make things better is a line straight out of the Tory playbook. Constant criticism when the Tories do it, so why shouldn't Labour be in for the same when they do similar ?

I think most people would genuinely support this process if they thought they were going to get a better service. But I also think that it is far from evident that they have done a decent study and that this isn't some sort of knee jerk reaction to spiraling government expenditure. It's whether you believe Labour can actually make the situation better by doing this, and what evidence do they have/conducted to demonstrate this ?

The problem I have when politicians start talking about axing 7000 jobs is that axe is very blunt and rarely hits to divide the best people from the worst. It's all about the headline and on the emphasis on reducing the expenditure, not on actually improving the service. The good people often get so demoralised they cut and run anyway leaving the dross behind.

I tend to prefer a less headline grabbing approach where reform of a service is conducted from within. But that doesn't generate the headlines Labour wants, even if they come at the expense of good peoples jobs.

The NHS will be on it's knees unless and until social care is properly addressed.

Let's hope the rumours that Labour are planning to cut benefits for the severely disabled (those found completely medically unable to work) are indeed just rumours.

Or thousands of carers will have to give up caring for their loved ones in order to get a job, which will end up costing the state tens of thousands per person. Social care cannot handle this influx, but there would be no other option.

Based on the Blair years I'm awaiting the appointment of 'management consultants' being paid thousands a day to help sack thousands of people.

Edit: Tories were no better despite their promises.

I think it’s a mistake. Arms length oversight is a real positive and I think reform rather than removal was the way forward. Some really good coproduction and engagement has happened as a result of NHSE.

I hadn’t even realised there was an “NHS England”

That is not true.

Loads of DHSC staff were made redundant in when NHSE was formed. Then in 2017 about 600 were made redundant. I think there might have been further redundancy programmes after that. At some point DHSC realised that it had got rid of too many staff and recruited again. Madness.

My DD is now back in the NHS, the admin holes ie where she spends clinic time doing admin and bureaucracy, where she spends time form filling for NHS England for no apparent purpose, is shocking...

Little of this existed when she was in Australia, nothing like the same extent.

What slimming down of bureaucracy did the Tories advocate? NHS admin doubled under the Tories.... with poorer patient outcomes.

Even Hunt is welcoming this change and another ex Tory Health sec says "wishes the Tories had had the courage to do this"

The NHS needs reform, thats not controversial, large scale reforms like this will always generate headlines, tinkering from within, wont make any difference at all.
Plus Headlines are generated by the media but of course Labour also need some good headlines too...

Good people in NHS England will soon get other employment, no job lasts forever.

Agreed. I had a good friend, sadly died since, who was senior in the NHS and worked for the Dept of Health - when they invented NHS England she had to reapply for the equivalent job in that - in fact I think they "rearranged" her job and department at least twice during a few years. She said at the time that the Tories had broken the NHS and she was very pessimistic about its future.

I believe NHS England is responsible for commissioning services so who will do that? It allocates & distributes funds to the CCGs - that's pretty essential
Also social care are terrible at running anything. It's very unclear what this move does other than create mass redundancies

I work in a field where I've had a lot of contact with NHSE. The rhetoric about NHS managers and people working in this organisation is disgusting. the work that these people do was done in the past by the Strategic Health Authorities and the old PCTs. No one in the organisation would disagree that Lansley's reforms were a disaster that cost the public £hundreds of millions. However, they worked in the structure and have done the best they could. These are people whose working lives are dictated by the whims of a SoS whose only experience of the NHS has been as a patient. Not just one....a long, long line of SoS who don't understand what the job is and don't bother to understand because all they really care about is re-election, and headlines about sacking NHS managers are always popular. As we can see on here. Such ignorance, even from their own colleagues on the front line.

I have no skin in the game, other than having worked closely with NHSE for many years to procure and deliver services that help patients. As one friend of mine said today - "sack us all....it'll cost at least £500million in redundancies and that's before we get to the ICBs....let the front line manage without us....then watch it all collapse."

I do t wish to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the timing of this, together with the massively reduced safeguards for the Assisted Dying Bill do give the impression that the government are trying to kill off the poor and vulnerable.

I can't see the whole of NHSE being sacked. How many staff are there? Maybe some will be offered a job in DHSC, others elsewhere in the NHS.

It is shit the staff are being left out on a limb, wondering what's going to happen to them, though.

@oboeannie am not disagreeing with the content of your post but you stated 'These are people whose working lives are dictated by the whims of a SoS whose only experience of the NHS has been as a patient.'

I recall one junior minister in what was then DH who was a clinician and they were worse, IMO, than other contemporary Ministers 'whose only experience of the NHS has been as a patient' with an additional layer of self-belief and use of 'as a clinician'.

So what are these "unnecessary" forms them ?

Most of the people I know who complain about bureaucracy are the first to pick up the phone to lawyers when something goes wrong to their family or hasn't been done according to procedure.

It's a consequence of the society we live in. If we are going to hold people more and more accountable for their actions, then there is going to be more and more costs associated with that process. And more and more checking in order to try to prevent those costs.

Doctors and nurses work under huge pressure, often treating over a hundred patients a day. When most people make a mistake they can rub it out or hit delete on the keyboard. When medics make a mistake it can end peoples lives. Couple this with things like patient data protection the whole process of treatment can become a nightmare.

There is an argument that we are regulating ourselves out of existence, but if we chose to limit regulation then we need to accept that there are going to be real, potentially life ending consequences to that process.

I recall one junior minister in what was then DH who was a clinician and they were worse

Dr Dan?

You're right. Sorry, mostly no NHS experience. But by god some of the clinicians I've had to work with who've managed to get Clinical Lead positions were absolutely dire....ineffective and arrogant. Not just the old white male consultants either.

It feels unfair to confirm your guess eve on an anonymous forum.

As an aside, did you have any contact with him during his tenure?

I worked for Health Education England (HEE) at the time when it was merging with NHS England and they had to get rid of 40% of staff. I don’t know loads about NHSE but I can tell you that HEE was definitely full of pen pushers.

I was a band 6 when I left and jobs like mine would be no more than a band 4 in a trust. There were people without degrees in fabulous managerial roles of £80k plus who didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

Anyway, I can just imagine that the left over staff who made it through the voluntary redundancy (which I took) and ended up in NHSE are still just the same so it’s probably for the best really. It’ll save a lot of money which will be better spent on the front line. There was just so much money wasted. We once moved offices and they just let the staff take all the furniture home or chucked it just so they could buy new stuff so it ‘matched’. Who bloody cares if an office chair ‘matches’.

No. But I heard stuff from colleagues.

Which countries are they looking to move abroad to? Just out of curiosity?

I was offered a temp contract doing this. Left after 3 days. Manager was on £80k and had three of us doing consultancy bollocks, one of whom was getting hotels paid for.

I told the agency I had a conscience, therefore couldn't do it. Actually we were going to make nurses' lives harder with performance mgmt crap.

NGL if you offered it to me now, I might take it because I'm no longer at a point I'd refuse easy money. But the job I was given shouldn't exist. Nor all the jobs facilitating it.