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?

WELL SAID. And this - sadly - is exactly why the government have done this with no planing and no strategy. To pander exactly to this element of the electorate who believe all the shit fed to them by the Daily Mail about pen pushers.

That's because the Tories put all the power with the ICBs who basically mark their own homework so there's little effective accountability, and NHSE seems to be unwilling to ringfence funding so the ICBs should it on whatever they want, but the structure does allow for it and the current government could have tried that first. Like they could have got rid of duplicated functions and roles first. Just axing a huge organisation is going to be a nightmare and the DHSC doesn't want all those jobs going into their remit!
It's been very poorly thought through.

Totally agree with this too. So much resource will go into the next ICB restructure car crash and will distract from some really important work - a lot of which, interestingly, is directly linked to the priorities outlined in the recent planning guidance. I.e. the stuff the government want us to do to make things less shit. And how effective are people going to be when they are literally having to dash to the toilets to cry because they are so worried about not being able to pay their mortgages.

Interesting post. At the risk of sounding too simplistic would you say the care sector is where they should be focused on? It seems everyone knows that's where many of the issues lie but they are unwilling or unable to tackle it.

Also as someone who has spent too much a bit of time in hospitals lately all the nurses I have encountered have been amazing, so thanks for what you do 💐.

That is what they are called, I didn't make the phase up. If you google "NHS pen pushers" there are literally thousands of hits.

Just because there are thousands of hits online about something, that does not make it a real thing.

You're wildly, wilfully ignorant and every post just makes that more obvious.

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

You do your argument no favours with cheap jibes. I don't watch GB news or read the Mail. I work in admin in the public sector. Of course it can be stressful but not enough to go on long term sick.

Absolutely this. I work for an ICB and we are 4 months out of our last restructure where we lost 30% of our workforce. We are now faced with at least another 50% reduction in running costs.

I am tired of explaining over and over again but work still has to be done. I don't disagree that things need to be improved and there is certainly duplication to be cut but this rhetoric that everyone in the NHS who doesn't work in a front line service is a a waste of space is too much when you're fighting for your job (agaon) which you absolutely know needs to be done.

Maybe not in your role, but I can assure you in many roles it can be. I dont think I can really quote specifics of some of the awful situations our admin staff have been through in the last few years due to confidentiality but certainly justifiable situations for some people to feel they are unable to cope at work and be off with stress related illness.

I work in a corporate function and am very lucky to have an extremely hard working and supportive team around me, very little sickness etc however we work closely with clinical services and I can 100% see how it is very different for them and their admin teams.

To everyone saying YANBU I hope you’re not the kind of person who howls in outrage when things like diversity and inclusion aren’t considered, or when safeguarding checks aren’t carried out, or when health and safety misses something very crucial, or when an impact assessment is deemed not necessary. On one hand you all hate management, but on the other actually rely on all the things they do.

I dont disagree that there are inefficiencies that need to be tackled. But there are centralised jobs that need to be done on a national scale.
Kier and Wes say we need more tech and AI. Great. Who's setting the standards for that? Or do you want each trust to make their own decisions about standards? Or do you want to know that there's a national standard for AI x-ray screening?
People say they want more efficiency but is it more efficient for each individual trust to separately negotiate contracts with suppliers or is there benefit in some centralisation/better deals if you buy in bulk etc?

What about paying the drs and nurses? Do you want each trust to have separate payroll systems or would it make sense for this to be done centrally?

The people who do these jobs aren't clinical? Clinical people may not actually be good at these jobs. Are these people pen pushers? I do think think there's a massive misunderstanding on how much is needed in the background to make anything run.

If health and safety are missing something crucial, then there are big problems, and the current management is not fit for purpose.

Did you have anything relevant to the debate to say or are you just here to deliver the usual cheap sneer?

You won’t think it’s a good thing when the country tumbles into recession. Thousands of redundant public sector workers means thousands of extra people completing for jobs. Wages will be driven through the floor.

Read the words. The actual words. This post is saying that things like health and safety functions are being carried out by the people that you say are worthless pen pushers. You can't have it both ways. You can't celebrate the demise of people who the press and te government have told you are worthless, but also insist that the jobs they do are important.

I know it wasn't my post but as an NHS manager if I may chime in, I completely concur that simply throwing more staff at the NHS won't fix the problem, IIRC we actually already employ more clinical staff than ever before but obviously problems are still there. If I had a lot of money to spend to improve things I personally would, in no particular order:

1. Fix the physical space, so many hospitals mine included are struggling uphill against multi-million pound annual maintenance bills and endless facilities issues and constraints in knackered Victorian buildings, not talking paint flaking off the walls/tired decor here, it's whole wards being closed on a regular basis because there's sewage pouring out of the ceiling or no heating in the middle of winter. And then you wonder why there's no beds and A&E is backed up. The cancellation of the new hospitals programme such a gut punch to hospitals like mine.

1. Sort the education system out, if we could it needs a wholesale overview, we have high class undergrads nurses and AHPs graduating with no jobs to go to, post-grad doctors oversubscribed into certain specialties and others mysteriously unable to fill positions, trusts don't find out who they're getting or more often not getting into resident doctor rotas until weeks before leaving managers (yes!) scrambling to get any old person into the shifts or begging the existing docs to cover.

1. Care sector relevant, I think we do need to invest into having much more flexible capacity both in the care home and at home care sector with everything that goes with it, social work, OTs, district nurses to get the medically optimised elderly back out of hospital quickly and also ideally to keep them out of hospital in the first place by preventing falls, treating infections early etc etc. I don't know enough about the care sector really to know if it's simply lack of staff but I suspect again it's complex and multi-factorial.

1. Preventative medicine, as we age as a population and also live for longer with chronic and complex illnesses we simply can't carry on with a model where we wait for people to get seriously ill then treat them in hospital. Primarily thinking of the elderly here but also mental health etc. This is so hard because it needs joined up thinking and investment in the 'unsexy' parts of the system like housing, at home care, IAPT, welfare/benefits and not into exciting visible things like hospitals (I say that as a hospital manager who naturally is going to fight for as much funding and attention for exciting things like new bits of kit for the hospital which of course people tend to prefer to see money spent on over something like providing physio for long term jobless or supported housing for patients with moderate mental health problems).

There's loads more like digital, workforce review, safety and incident response, efficiency,. sustainability but those are what I would personally wave a magic wand to fix...

There is no need to get personal and insult me.

I started this thread to get more information and you haven't contributed anything.

I never understand people who come onto discussions just to berate the poster and tell them off for not going onto Google to research something and then tell them they are stupid.

You’ve misread what I wrote entirely.

You have insulted an entire profession of human beings, some of whom are about to lose their jobs, without bothering to find out anything about what's happening or what any of us actually do. You're the one who started this thread by being insulting. What's your job? How would you like it if I started a thread saying it was great that you were going to lose your job because your entire purpose was pointless?

<hands op an even bigger stirring spoon>

I'm a community mental health nurse. It won't work in terms of getting more frontline staff, because there is no one to recruit

@NoctuaAthene Thank you for the detailed respond. You make some really interesting points and there are quite a few things that had never occurred to me and I have not seen reported in any of the media coverage. Even stuff like the maintenance which is clearly a bigger deal than people are aware of.

Hope your not finding the jovial posts about managers potentially losing their jobs too disheartening.

Basically the "too many managers in the NHS" argument is the same as saying Tesco only needs staff to put the food on the shelves.

If I have insulted anyone I apologise; that was not my intention. I work in admin myself so I am also a pen pusher.