Wednesday 15 September 2010

How big?

The National Health Service (NHS) is one of the biggest organisations in the world after the People's Liberation Army of China and comparable to the Indian National Railway System. The INRS daily transports 20 million passengers and 2 million tonnes of goods.  


While not denigrating the immense good done by the NHS in emergency situations, one wonders why  £330 million were spent on management consultants in 2009, a sum almost as great as that spent on combined lung cancer and skin cancer treatment and research. 


There are certainly great savings to be made in this unwieldy service.

4 comments:

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  2. Being a management consultant (good grief, where did that "title" come from?) is like owning your own mint. And for what? Well, okay, for 330 million pounds Sterling, that's for what, but what did they do to earn that kind of money?
    One really has to wonder, because certainly they don't do anything useful. They didn't research or treat cancer. They didn't carry passengers back and forth across anywhere, never mind anywhere as large as India.
    They consulted with NHS management personnel, probably managers who themselves make more money than researchers or doctors. They gave the managers something to do with their time, which might (perhaps) have been better spent managing.

    Sigh.

    Given that the NHS is, as you say, and as I have often read elsewhere, unwieldy, and given that great savings can be made, when will those savings amount to the 330 million it cost to have consultants tell them how to make the savings?
    Isn't it rather like a dog chasing its tail?
    --K

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  3. That's the thing about humungous government systems. It becomes too expensive because of mismanagement and trying to keep everybody on the same page.

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  4. 'A dog chasing its own tail' is just about right and does no credit to the hardworking medical staff.

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