Sarnia
I didn't vote for Labour but I have to say that Sir Keir Starmer is doing a pretty good job at the moment.
Having worked for the NHS for the last 17 years of my working life it was glaringly obvious that the NHS, a wonderful organisation, if manged properly, was in crisis and this was pre-Covid. Various Governments have talked endlessly about the NHS but do nothing. It is crying out for reform and culling the admin staff which have grown at an alarming rate over the years is the place to start.
Keep going, Sir Keir. You may actually grow on me.
I disagree on the comment about reducing admin staff. So you would prefer to have highly trained medical staff doing their own admin? Inviting patients to appointments, inputting notes and writing letters?
I worked for the NHS for many years and I’m now retired. I lead a highly efficient admin team undertaking recruitment and retention work for a large trust.
We took the burden of admin tasks relating to recruitment off of the shoulders of very hard-working medics.
I believe what the NHS needs is highly professional managers actually managing - dealing properly with immense sickness absence that cripples teams. We need good managers who can effectively procure across a large number of trusts. The way the NHS procures and undertakes capital projects is often inefficient.
Our trust, for example, has a procurement team of about 10 people and less than 3 miles away, another trust had an equally large procurement team procuring the same things. Surely it makes sense to have region wide procurement teams purchasing in large quantities.
To achieve this, I don’t believe we need teams of consultants from PWC or KPMG to tell us what staff members already know.
