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

This!

"We need to focus on increasing places at university for Drs and Dentist courses in the U.K."

This is absolutely incorrect. Anyone in the field will tell you there is a current backlog of doctors wanting to be in training but are not able to get a training number due to an insufficient number of training posts.

Some doctors' careers have been put on hold for 5+ years - that's thousands of consultants we would have had, but don't, simply due to investing money in the wrong places. We definitely do not need more money invested into medical school places before we invest in carving out career paths for newly graduating doctors.

Increasing the number of places at this stage would only create more doctors who want to leave the country for places such as the USA and Australia for better working conditions, better pay and better respect.

I never said the clinical part of NHS England I said the clinical part of the NHS. These will be junior/resident doctors and people who had moved from other trusts or had relevant training.

So your comment is about medical staff training, not NHS England

have you confused NHS and NHS England?

The Tories were the ones who created NHSE and even they realise it was a mistake. Hunt has supported it going.

It has nothing to do with wanting to privatise the NHS, quite the opposite in fact!

NHSE was created under Lansley, who was trying to parcel up the NHS to make it easier to privatise. Scrapping NHSE and bringing its functions back into DHSC reverses that.

I think a lot of people don't understand what NHSE is.

www.england.nhs.uk/about/what-we-do/

This is very true. We need a way to be more agile and actively manage those with poor attendance records or poor performance however current govt policy makes that very difficult.

I work for NHSE. Any questions let me know!

there are many things we do for services that are managed at a national level.

those bowel cancer screening kits that hit your mat? NHSE

your prescription getting to your pharmacy electronically? NHSE

NHS App? NHSE.

I could go on, but after redundancies (which are needed), a significant amount of us will still be doing the same job as before.

All those stupid how did we do today texts which can't be replied to, all those survey leaflets we have to give patients after an outpatient encounter which takes as long to complete as the outpatient encounter.
All those spreadsheets we have to complete about how long it took to do any process and why it was delayed (because I had to fill in this fucking spreadsheet)
My NHS team ran well up to about fifteen years ago we had a good admin section who did the non clinical work for us - rotas, leave, most sickness. It is now taken over by an app our admin section was got rid of but everything has to be duplicated by a member of the clinical team as the app doesn't work properly and you can never get hold of someone to sort it.
Hopefully it will be the lazy and the incompetent who get let go but previous experience knows different

I work as a secretary in the NHS. In my Trust there are six, yes SIX managers between me and the deputy director of operations, and I don't know how they are connected to the CEO. It's ridiculous.

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

Well NHSE have notably failed to prevent any of the big scandals in maternity care with their bureaucracy, nor have any of the other intemediate layers to "regulate". Scandal after scandal appears, usually only because of whistleblowers risking their careers, only to be fought vigourously through the courts by the NHS fiefdoms. We have some of the worst maternity outcomes in Europe, especially for black women. Its a disgrace in one of the worlds top ten economies which has elevated state health care to the status of national reilgion.

The massive injection of money in the Blair years was supposed to result in reformation of the NHS and makeit more patient centric, not just massaging of waiting lists. Instead most of it went to massage waiting lists and it of course it gained better patient feedback. However yet again, actual meaningful change to the system and making it more patient centric was resisted in favour of sticking to antique business systems, procurement processes which frankly should be criminal and processes which lack patient focus in favour of box ticking. Hopefully this Labour government will be more successful in actually reforming the NHS in return for the money injected or bite the bullet for radical change in state backed healthcare.

Where from? I admit I'm not following it closely but I thought the plan was to abolish the organisation

I'm one of those "pen-pushers" who has today found out that I will more than likely lose my job before Christmas. Some of these posts are incredibly insensitive. Not everyone knows what NHS England does, they're just guessing. But I can tell you, we don't sit twiddling our thumbs. I lost 40% of my amazing workforce following a restructure. I'm working 50+ hours a week and even now I can see that some of my team are still online because we're absolutely snowed under.

And please have a bit of empathy. Yes we have high paid jobs. But we also have children to feed, bills to pay etc just like the rest of us. I've got two team members who have handed their cars back to the Fleet scheme in prep for their new ones arriving. And today they've cancelled all the cars on order. So from Monday I've two staff members with kids and school runs, yet with no car.

The #bekind mantra should apply in every situation. It's a difficult time for us all.

I used to work for NHSE and there truly is so much duplication with DHSC. For example, both orgs have policy teams for the same clinical conditions. Briefings written for NHSE executives were not allowed to be shared with DHSC staff so they’d have to write their own. The secrecy was ridiculous too, not being allowed to tell DHSC things even when it was in both orgs best interests to do so.

I now work for an ICB and a 50% cut will hopefully force them to make decisions they’ve chickened out of since being formed. For example, rather than combining CCGs into the ICB they kept the CCG footprints as ‘places’ with the associated duplication of functions and staff in each. A restructure 2 years ago declared there would be no job losses as a result. A frequent refrain heard across my ICB is that there are too many cooks.

I don’t want to lose my job but as a tax payer I can only support this.

Those complaining about form filling/ data collection - how do you think the NHS gets the data to plan and budget? If no one knows things like how long patients are waiting to be seen, how long treatment takes, what the outcomes are, how can anything be planned or improved?

There used to be work done on data quality, which doesn’t happen any more, and trusts used to have to publish quality reports setting out how they had done against key targets such as A&E waiting times and cancer treatment waiting times, and all this was audited (by people like me - and I did a thorough job because I cared about it!) alongside the annual accounts, so that those making the decisions knew the information could be trusted - this also doesn’t happen now and I often wonder if a lack of good quality information is yet another thing contributing to the NHS’s problems.

On a totally different point, a PP said they hoped these reforms would include a refocus of resources on primary care - I think that would be amazing; anecdotally from DH there is just more and more stuff being pushed into primary providers because secondary care can’t or don’t want to deal with it, and every appointment he has seems to start with the patient complaining about an experience they’ve had in secondary care. He comes home almost every day saying ‘I can’t do this any more’ and I don’t know what I can do to help other than suggesting he change careers - which is obviously not what the NHS needs.

Totally agree that those are the programmes that can go, if they even are NHSE (other than the app). I doubt the surveys are.

interesting point, we spend millions correcting errors caused by GP registrations. NHS App issues are usually due to demographic errors on patient records.

plus they need to integrate with GP systems. That’s a whole other story.

I work for NHSE. This came as a massive shock today as we only found out when Starmer announced it. People are really shocked and upset.

There is undoubtedly some duplication between NHSE and DHSC and room for streamlining but not as much as people think as we have different statutory functions. There is also far less senior management and bureaucrats than is reported. I think there’s some real misunderstandings about the role of NHSE here and you’re talking about people who we terrified of losing their jobs.

On behalf of DHSC. The press is different from the news NHSE received. We’ve been told we are to merge with DHSC

NHSE run critical IT for the NHS

@CaptainWentworth in fairness, we had that data for a very long time before 2013.

In fact, my father was ill (on and off) from about 1992 onwards and there has always been access to data. I have spent many an hour reading it (and wondering why I'm reading it).

from what I recall, patient waiting times and satisfaction with the NHS was highest around 2009. Of course I appreciate figures are ...interpreted... in the way they are presented. But that does tally quite a bit with my experience.

I fully appreciate this is not all about NHS England. But reform has to start somewhere and this seems like a good place. I don't think the NHS can continue as it is and actually in many ways it's over providing in some areas and under providing in others. I can't see have benefited a huge amount from the data made available in recent years.

I have said this before, and it's not popular, but in some ways, statistics feed into patient protocols and that can be damaging to the patient as an individual.

Another interesting point, I’ve been doing a very similar role within 4 differently named organisations.

we’ve been merged with another org more than once.

And I do agree that money needs to be spent on the frontline.

And for those asking about T&C:

DHSC has better benefits in terms of maternity leave and lower pension contributions but the salary tends to be quite a bit lower than the NHS equivalent band.

eg, DHSC pays 6 months full pay for maternity leave, NHS is 8 weeks full pay, 18 weeks half pay.

NHS staff would usually be TUPE’d across to DHSC so would remain on NHS T&C until they moved roles, which would probably be on civil service T&C. This then creates more disparity as you’d have 2 people at the same grade on quite different terms and salaries.

Did people literally learn about the risk to their jobs when it was announced on the news? Regardless of what you think of the organisation, that’s awful and I hope people aren’t feeling too awful tonight

Yes! Absolutely appalling way to treat people.

Disgraceful