Burning our money, the fire goes on

I warn you not to read any further if you have a slightly dicky ticker, the following figures may shock you so much that it may result in a burning rage so severe as to drive you to the very edge. It's that subject again, the NHS and its amazingly wasteful and inefficient bureaucracy.

The Conservative party have worked out that the NHS' bureaucracy now costs around 12 billion to run each year, a rise of around 100% in just five years, that's almost a rise of 20% in administrative spending per year, utterly amazing. Incredibly this massive figure does not even include the money spent on PCT administration and waste which is probably another monumentally huge figure given their Kafka-esque setup. The 12 billion figure only includes the DoH, Quangos and the regional health authorities (SHAs).

The number of managers is increasing at a rate far outweighing their need, the number of useless arms length agencies also continues to rise and rise, here are some of the little gems the DoH has recently excreted:

"Cosmetic Surgery Steering Group, Advisory Board on Registration of Homeopathic Medicines, Alcohol Education and Research Council, Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee, Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, and the Leadership and Race Equality Action Plan Independent Panel"

It's just so wasteful that it's hard to come up with words, I'm almost beyond rage, I am also now beyond laughing and crying, I just try to get on with my daily job. Every year there are more and more layers of useless bureaucracy which end up using up the extra money that should be going to the productive front line services, there are more and more uneducated idiots with no knowledge of health care and medicine being empowered so that they can decide how to throw money onto this wanton bonfire of our money. PCTs are now paying people to lose weight, what next paying people for exercising and not injecting drugs?

Ironically as a front line NHS worker 'Clinical Governance' is allegedly the system that means that health care in the NHS should always go from strength to strength, it's about creating the right 'open' environment in which training prospers, mistakes are learnt from and evidence is always studied before any money is frittered away. Sadly Clinical Governance appears like someone's sick joke as virtually all of it is ignored, while the opposite seems to be the case in the reality of the NHS. The 'open' culture is so open that whistle blowers get burnt at the stake, the training is so important that the untrained are empowered, while the evidence is routinely ignored by policy makers as they only care for propaganda, gimmickry and ideology. Brave old NHS indeed.