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COMMENT
 
No steady hand at the health service wheel

• FIRST reaction, among many people, to the savage job losses announced this week by the Royal Free Hospital is to cast the blame on hospital’s board and its chief executive Andrew Way .
Incompetence and maladministration – these are probably the accusations many will level at the Free’s management.
How can a hospital find itself with a deficit, first announced last August as £10 million, and now admitted to be well over £30 million, unless there is something wrong with the people running it?
The Royal Free’s management, of course, cannot be held blameless.
Bearing in mind, that salaries are always the largest element in the expenditure column of a balance sheet, a top heavy tier of managers – many drawing excessive salaries – obviously doesn’t help matters.
We warned about this last year.
But the root causes lie elsewhere – actually in the way the National Health Service has been run since Labour came into power eight years ago.
Instead of there being a steady hand at the wheel, the NHS has had to endure one infantile shake-up after another.
So far, four ministers have had a go at it! Frank Dobson, Alan Milburn, John Reid and now Patricia Hewitt – the last three seen as incompetent meddlers by many doctors and nurses.
There is little doubt the NHS was cruelly underfunded for decades and that Gordon Brown tried to make amends by pouring in extra billions. But, tragically, much of this has been swallowed up in one hare-brained scheme after another.
Salary increases to consultants and GPs – making them the highest paid doctors in Europe – may well have been overdue, but was it necessary to pay GPs more than £100,000 a year and allow them to work fewer hours?
Targets for waiting lists may sound a good idea to a health minister, who uncritically swallows everything Tony Blair’s policy wonks come up with, but why didn’t someone ask the first question a good business manager would want to know the answer to – how much will it cost?
If they had, they would have seen the massive costs – and run a mile.
Some waiting lists – but not all – did need to come down.
But there were better, and cheaper ways of reducing them, than simply imposing a blanket system for every hospital, whatever its size and whatever its resources.
Instead of hospital trusts turning in on themselves and cutting staff jobs and other forms of expenditure, they should have the courage to publicly expose the real villains in this drama – the government itself.

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.
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