As many regular readers know I despise the NHS. I believe that it’s one of the worst systems that a nation could have to provide comprehensive healthcare for Britons. It’s management top heavy and although some ground level staff are great, there are many others who I would not trust to treat animals let alone people. These bad staff, the sort who flourish in any state run bureaucracy are incompetent, lazy, prone to tick box medicine and sometimes unbelievably inhumane and cruel.
The NHS is also incredibly wasteful. It is an organisation that sucks up an enormous amount of the country’s GDP yet often fails to provide the decent healthcare that British subjects require. There seems to be little money for genuinely needed improvements to healthcare but plenty of money for destructive and unnecessary parasites who do nothing to benefit the patient.
A lot of these parasites are to be found in the NHS’s burgeoning ‘diversity and inclusion’ sector and who are occupying positions such as those in the screen shot below.
None of these positions help the NHS do what it is supposed to do and treat the illnesses of patients. All they do is suck money away from more vital and necessary areas. The fact that these highly paid and unnecessary posts exist in the NHS is pretty good evidence that the NHS model of providing comprehensive healthcare is broken and is unable to be properly repaired. It galls me that we have a Conservative government who should be cracking down on this waste and creating for Britons a health service that is both cost effective and which works properly, but who don’t do that. Sadly I’ve long since stopped expecting conservative policies on everything from the economy to free speech from the current Conservative Party.
Yep, I so like light on the NHS, objective as far as possible with no reverance to the sacred cow. However although we can criticise the NHS’s arguably top heavy managememt structures for instance I’m not sure if highlighting jobs for Diversity posts necessarily indicates all that is wrong with it.
As far as I can gather incorporating Diversity Officers into HR departments of companies started in the US in the 1980s when with diverse work forces they were fearing Civil Rights lawsuits. So maybe an hard nosed economic decision, and to ultimately save the companies money?
I kind of see the NHS as a much broader issue about how we get the balance between private and public healthcare. A perk of many even moderately paid jobs in the UK now is to offer membership of private health insurance and provider companies such as BUPA.
The NHS started with a noble aim in 1948 to provide more equality of access to healthcare and so beneficial from a Public Health perspective which was in line with the rethinking after WW2 and the election of the Labour government.
I’ll stop waffling now, for the moment…..
The number of these jobs and the salaries of them is indicative of a culture of waste and management self entitlement. A decent and professional HR department could manage any alleged diversity issues without the massive waste that these positions represent. As regard the balance between public and private maybe there should not be such a division? There should be some facilities that are private some public but in the main the majority of costs should be paid by public insurance or the taxpayer. The rise in private health perks might be down to people seeing that the NHS is a mess?
The NHS was a good idea at the time but it was first thought of in the 1930’s and I don’t believe that the NHS model is suitable for today. We don’t have equality of access to healthcare at the moment despite the existence of the NHS so maybe we should look at some other model to provide comprehensive health care?
BTW you are not waffling, your contributions are thoughtful and interesting.
We don’t have a Conservative government. What we have is a government that is Conservative in name only.
I’m afraid that you are correct. Waste like this is low hanging fruit that could be plucked off in order to show that the Tories are tackling waste.
D & I is a consideration in other state funded bodies. I recently participated in an Emergency Services exercise to “road test” planning for an emergency situation. At the end of the exercise there was a survey of participants’ thinking about and reactions to the exercise. One of the questions asked whether or not beliefs and values were considered in a respectful manner.
Another was “could more have been put in place to support diversity and inclusion during the . . . . .exercise?” For goodness sake, it was supposed to be a test of an emergency situation where there would not be time to ask about inclination, diet, religion, colour, whatever.
This fish (like the NHS?) had rotted from the head down. Fortunately, the rot hadn’t reached the people on the ground, because whilst all the volunteers were treated with respect, no D & I stupidity was apparent.