To think the NHS Significant job losses are a good thing to get rid of management pushing paper around all day and increase the number of hands on staff

[Husbandrippedmeoff]

What does this mean, will they be slashing the number of people who work in management?

Do you work for the NHS are you worried?

The thing is though, he’s wanting everyone in work and contributing to the Economy yet at the same time he’s cutting 1000s upon 1000s of jobs.

He can’t have it both ways.

Do you think it might have been a sensible idea to find out the difference yourself before starting a thread on it?

Yes, there is a difference, and Google is a thing.

The entire public sector needs to be slashed significantly. Unfortunately it won’t happen. The government has created 27 quangos already. So much for slimming down the public sector.

I don’t think it’s a good thing for anyone to be losing their jobs. WTF am I or is anyone to say it’s a good thing. We’re not going to be offering a roof to these people if they lose their jobs and can’t pay their mortgage are we.

Don’t know what happened there with the underlining

The money used to fund NHS England will probably not be seen by NHS services

Many of the functions of NHS England still have to be performed and the money will probably be kicked upstairs to the Department of Health

You are misinformed. Admin is extremely stressful and poorly paid. But you probably watch GB news an get your info from the daily mail so I don’t blame you for being misinformed

The focus of review is NHS England. Not the NHS.
Hiwever, I worked in the NHS for over 30 years and agree that good, competent, efficient management is vital.
It is extremely tedious being managed by overpromoted people who have no clue about the roles or service they are managing. If your manager knows nothing about the service, you end up with a clinical space with 20 chairs and 2 consulting rooms for a clinic that sees over 100 patients in a morning. You might have 4 clinicians available but you cant use them if only 2 rooms are available. That is one small example from my personal experience.

The current structure does not allow for the appropriate oversight and accountability. That much is a fact. So I personally support drastic change.

I work for NHSE. I’ve been around long enough to see many, many restructures. Each one more poorly handled than the last and leading to a lot of extra money being spent on redundancies and other expenses. I was around for Lansley and yes, the reforms were crap and botched, but just abolishing a part of the nhs structure that has had more and more functions thrown at it by the DHSC and various whims of SoS who know fuck all about the nhs and only care about their headlines, isn’t the answer.
I’m a fairly senior manager in a region and my portfolio includes -
leading a massive digital project in primary care which involves a team working directly with practices to identify where their gaps are in offering digital services to patients (you know the analogue to digital work that Wes streeting wants) and then working with them to procure these tools (cos they don’t have the skills or knowledge to do that themselves)
overseeing a major programme of work aimed at reducing health inequalities by working with commissioners to identify where they are in their areas and planning work to increase access to healthcare. This includes allocating a £multi-million budget and overseeing how it is spent
working with colleagues in ICBs to produce plans that are realistic and not going to increase their deficit anymore and then holding them accountable to delivering these

and several more smaller bits of work that I won’t bore you with but if not done, you would notice fairly quickly.

Get rid of me and the many many other managers like me if you want. I’ll get a job easily in the private sector. But your health services will notice and so will you when you next use them.

Vote Labour working classes! You’ll all be better off.

Except you won’t. As many of you are rapidly finding out. Is there any group out there that are happy with this miserable excuse for a “government”. It’s like the 6th form debating society cosplaying at being in power.

I have posted this before on other threads, but I'll put it here again:

NHS England run centralised IT services (e.g. the NHS spine which contains patient data), and runs pretty much all the education of all staff, including clinical staff across the NHS.

They also have responsibilities relating to research and actually putting together information from all the local hospitals so e.g. Wes Streeting's team can get information in a format where they can actually analyse it.

They organise the delivery of national immunisation programmes and making sure e.g. COVID vaccines are where they need to be, when they need to be.

On top of that, they, working with ICBs which are also experiencing massive cuts, work out what services need to be offered to local populations (e.g. where is big enough to need an A and E, should doctors surgeries be allowed to close or do they need to be run by someone else, where should a minor injuries unit be, where should eating disorder patients be treated) and work out how to make sure the population has access to specialised commissioning such as proton beam therapy and how to manage tertiary (super specialist) hospitals.

They also work out how much money different areas and different organisations within different areas should get - boring but someone has to do it. They make sure local pharmacies have the contracts to do our prescriptions and that we have enough pharmacies in our local areas to meet our needs.

They agree and organise care for people who need complex, long term health care but who don't need to be in hospital.

You can't procure healthcare for 67 million people without the things above being managed. And that involves back office staff.

The organisations above have already been asked to make big savings under the last government (around 20-30% by the end of 2023-24). They are now being asked to make another 50% on top of that and in the case of NHS E are being merged with the department of health.

Pre COVID I worked for one Trust where the management came up with the brilliant idea to scrap all the ward clerks.

Result: nurses ended up having to answer the phones and track down patient records rather than being able to care for patients. If I recall correctly it was the number of patient relatives complaints about not being able to get through that helped the senior management team find their half dozen discarded brain cells and reinstate these underpaid and vital admin staff.

Anyone who seriously thinks this latest knee jerk announcement from the Clueless Party is going to actually result in more staff at the frontline might like to know about a bridge up for sale in Teesside.

The really sad thing is that a task force of 30 to 40 random NHS staff working at ground level could almost certainly come up with a workable, low to no harm plan to sort out the organisation.

I'm glad I'm not any younger. Though if I were I'd seriously look at emigrating.

And yes, I am a Labour supporter - but they are showing every day through their lack of planning and knowledge how little they actually expected to get into parliament.

NHS admin here. When your team has been cut in half due to people leaving and not being replaced due to a never ending vacancy ban then yes, it's bloody stressful. The clinical staff you support expect the same level of support they had before the team was reduced.

If you don't understand what NHS England is in the context of this highly complex and political situation then perhaps you should not be giving out your opinions so freely.

I support change because the current set up was largely put in place so that the government of the time could avoid accountability. It is much better that ministers will be more directly accountable.

But it’s hugely disruptive and expensive in the short term. Much of the stuff NHSE does will still have to be done by someone so we will be employing other people to do it just in a different setting. Which means we’ll be paying out redundancy for someone, and disrupting their life, and then employing that role in a different place, hiring someone else who will probably be leaving another role that will need to hire to replace, etc. i.e. A lot of churn (though that can have some benefits in terms of helping things not stagnate, it’s also disruptive and expensive).

It won’t do anything to increase frontline staffing. What increases frontline staffing is a commitment to increase frontline staffing backed up by the money to do so.

Actually, starting a thread on it has been very helpful, as posters have provided lots of information.

Do you think it might of been a sensible idea to check that you were posting something useful before replying to a thread?

When I'm feeling stressed about my job tomorrow, I'll be sure to think of this and just not feel stressed.

Given the shit you posted originally, complaining about someone else’s content is a bit rich.

Great post. It is beyond ridiculous for people to say that a system as massive and impactful as the NHS doesn't need to be managed. Managed more effectively, yes, probably, but "axe all the lazy managers" is headline-grabbing rhetoric. Shaun Lintern tweeted today that there has not been an impact assessment done for abolishing NHS England. Of course not. And the 50% cuts to ICBs... how have they come up with that number? Nice and round, isn't it... Look good in the newspapers, won't it...

Sorry what?

I find it hilarious that people trot out the same old line too many managers
when they have zero idea how many they are and what they do
NHS is enormous it employs an army of p of course it’s going to have a massive amount of of managers

50% cut to ICBs is really problematic. I don’t work in the NHS but I work closely with it and this means that (yet again) ICB colleagues are going to be focused on restructuring and whether they’ll have a job which will inevitably impact on the speed at which decisions are made locally and how quickly plans are implemented

what that means in reality is successful projects that support local people failing because we couldn’t get money to them quickly enough and the providers have had to stop doing them& make the staff redundant

It’s not a stealth boast that it’s enormous.

It’s actually problematic that it’s so inefficient that it has to be so large.

The NHS needs an axe taking to it and properly cutting down to size. It’s an absolutely diabolically inefficient money pit.

You started a thread to slag off people who work for NHSE, calling them 'paper pushers' and then 'pen pushers', and suggesting that it was ok for them to lose their jobs, without actually even knowing what they do or that NHSE isn't the same as the NHS.

I have no issue with people who start threads asking for further information or clarification about an issue. But you've just posted a bunch of goady, lazy and frankly ignorant rubbish so, yeah, a period of quiet reflection from you would be most welcome.

Precisely. In my experience it also lead to people with poor nursing skills being made into managers as rarely were people dismissed for being useless, just promoted!