Thursday, 3 September 2009

NHS staff in England

There is a handy chart at the bottom of this BBC article:
To summarise, back in 1997, there were 380,000 Admin/Support/Managers 1997 and 360,000 nurses/doctors/GPs. In 2008 there were 560,000 Admin/Support/Managers (up 47%, plus heck knows how many more tens of thousands in Dept of Health, Primary Care Trusts and all the quangoes like the Care Quality Commission) and 460,000 nurses/doctors/GPs (up 28%).

Just sayin', is all.

8 comments:

James Higham said...

If we managed to boot half of those bureaucrats out, where would they go? Onto the dole queue, do you think?

This is our dilemma with these people. We're supporting them at the moment, we support them on the dole. If they get other work, we don't support them but they're now at large.

bayard said...

ISTR the original idea of recruiting all those A/S/M staff was to free up Doctors and nurses from paperwork. However I was not surprised to find that now nurses are so busy doing paperwork that most of the actual nursing is left to nursing assistants. The same is probably true of the doctors. Oh, well, Parkinson proved right again.

bayard said...

@JH but they cost the country less on the dole, both in terms of pay and in term of not being in a position to fuck things up financially.

Mark Wadsworth said...

@ JH. Bayard has answered most admirably.

Here is the story aboutnursing assistants, by the way.

And with these people on a Citizen's Income rather than The Dole, there's nothing to stop them looking for prper jobs.

Dick Puddlecote said...

Yeah but remember all that death and pestilence back in 1997 though, MW. Do we really want to go back to those medieval conditions?

bayard said...

@DP Ah,yes, I was forgetting the Great Plague of 1996....

John B said...

"admin/support" includes cleaners, nursing assistants and porters, doesn't it>

Mark Wadsworth said...

JB, yes of course. But our hospitals aren't getting any cleaner (more MRSA deaths etc) and the nursing assistants are doing the work of nurses (see link above). So I think it's a fair conclusion that the bulk of the increase is managers.