David Osland (at the other place) offers a wonderfully concise critique of the utilisation of the private sector to deliver public goods....
'We're told pensions are 'unsustainable', the Post Office is 'unsustainable' & now that the NHS is 'unsustainable'. They were all entirely sustainable before the private sector starting looting the public sector'!
Yup, that's about it....
@ChrisMayLA6 The logic seems straightforward to me. Take the NHS as an example. An NHS which uses more and more private resource will not cost us less as we still have to pay for everything we currently pay for but we also have to stump up for profits. As shown by water infrastructure, private big business is way more interested in bonuses than it is in investing in the business. So an NHS with more privatisation will cost more and get worse.
Whilst I am not in any way in favour of the privatization of healthcare services, the current privatization drive may nevertheless result in the massive slimming down of the hugely overweight bureaucracy currently absorbing a disproportionate percentage of the NHS budget!
@Paulos_the_fog @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6 Managers make up just less than 3% of NHS workforce. Recent research by Institute for Public Policy Research suggested that the healthcare sector is under-managed, and this increases the burden of bureaucracy that falls on frontline professionals.
@Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6
I believe you will find that many 'managers' are classed as administrators rather than specifically as managers. In one case of which I am aware, a guy developing Excel spreadsheets for various purposes in a hospital was officially on the payroll as a nurse to help keep the balance between medical staff and others tipped on the medical side!
The best way to deal with bureaucracy is not to employ more pen-pushers to avoid frontline staff being burdened with it but to slash the bloody bureaucracy at least 50% of which is most likely totally unnecessary!
As a software engineer, I have done development work both for the NHS and for many other large organisations that are household names.
@Paulos_the_fog @Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6 my solution is simple, lose all middle managers and 1/3rd of senior managers. Frees up money without altering care.
If he was on the payroll as a nurse, he needed an NMC registration, or they were breaking far more than just a staffing levels bit.
@Thebratdragon @Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6
The guy was a nurse and a quite talented amateur programmer, so he was trained, qualified and registered as a nurse but wasn't actually doing that. When the hospital where he worked discovered his talents with Excel and VBA, they put him to work doing that instead of nursing as that was a more pressing need.
The story has a sad ending for the NHS, at least; the last I heard of him, he had been head-hunted via the grape-vine by a firm in the City of London where Excel skills are in huge demand, where he was earning around 5 times what a nurse is paid and eventually was put in charge of the Excel team at the asset management company where he worked on £250,000 a year.
@Paulos_the_fog @Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6 good for him, sad for patients.