NHS job cuts? Oh hell no!

Article this morning about a proposal by a team of "management consulatants" to cut the number of jobs in the NHS by 10% (or 137,000 jobs by 2014) to save the UK £20billion. But these jobs aren't office staff, pen pushers and filing clerks, these jobs are to be cut mainly from front-line services - Doctors, Nurses and the like. Quite rightly, the government has rejected these "short sighted" (Dr Mark Porter, BMA) proposals out of hand.

Now, in general, I'm against cutting any jobs, full stop. I'm especially against cutting the numbers of Doctors, and in particular nurses in the NHS. But on the other hand I accept that the NHS is a huge, cumbersome organisation which has a lot of waste that needs to be addessed. Particularly the fact that the NHS is a very top-heavy organisation with an abundance of "managers" (who don't seem to do much management), "advisors" (whose advice is usually pretty crap) and other such staff. Now, whilst I appreciate that there are intracacies of their jobs which help to provide valuble and important services, their is an abundance of waste. How the NHS can justify paying a "manager" a salary of £40,000 per year plus to do a common sense job, whilst a newly qualified nurse earns only £16-18,000 per annum, is beyond me.

There is a perfect opportunity to save money here, simply by cutting the ridiculous salaries of "managers" and higher staff such as Managing Directors (over a quarter of who earn more than £100,000 per annum!). These are people on enourmous salaries with ridiculous benefits (expensive company cars etc), who contribute very little and take a hell of a lot. Now some people would whinge about private business and how much their MDs earn, and how much bankers get in bonuses etc - but it's a simple matter of fact: If they don't want a reduced salary, they can leave the organisation so that someone who is just as skilled can take their place, because let's be fair, these people have no specialist skills or knowledge (other than experience, which as the recent banking crisis has shown is relatively worthless), and so can be easily and effectively replaced, even if only by their "underlings". The savings we are talking about are large, and the number of job losses are minimal - so it's a win-win scenario.

Secondly, the NHS needs to be diverse in ways of saving money. Drug companies such as Glaxo-Smith-Klein make enourmous sums of money charging the NHS for simple drugs that they could produce themselves, and the NHS seems to have little interest or investment in Research and Development beyond what is developed by private industry. Simple drugs and anaesthetics etc could quite easily be produced by hospitals at much lower costs than purchasing them from expensive drug companies, meaning not only could money be saved, but more expensive drugs (for cancer etc) could be made available to a greater proportion of the population, if the project was managed efficiently.

There are lots of other ways the NHS coiuld save money, and I'm not going to sit and list them all here. Let's hope that the government choose to do so in a way that doesn't make thousands of people unemployed or diminish the important service the NHS provides. We'll see enough of that when the Tories get in.