The British Left has for years been treating the National Health Service as some sort of secular religion. This NHS worship has also infected other parties as well with any party who wants to see reform of this inefficient and costly behemoth being accused of wanting to cut money to what is laughingly and inaccurately called by its supporters ‘the envy of the world’.
Governments are forced by the public who have been led to believe that the NHS is the jewel in the crown of Britain’s public services, to pump billions upon billions of pounds into a health service that often doesn’t do its job properly. Despite the extra money that has been splurged on the NHS in recent decades, the NHS is still a mess. Britons can still face a wait of two weeks for a General Practitioner appointment or have to attend hospitals that are often so bad that relatives have to stay close to their loved ones in hospital just to badger the staff to give the patient half decent treatment.
One thing that the NHS has been really good at is building the sort of sclerotic and wasteful bureaucracy that would have not been out of place in the old Soviet Union. Across the service there are layers of unnecessary management, diversity staff and administrators with the BBC reporting in 2018 that the NHS is recruiting managers at a faster rate since 2013 than they have hired medical staff.
One of the most egregious examples of NHS waste that I’ve come across was one that I saw being distributed around the Gab social media network. It’s a job advertisement for a post of a communications assistant for the NHS in Kent.
The post, which is for a maternity cover position, pays extremely handsomely with the lucky recipient getting approximately £73,000 per year for acting as the Assistant Director of Communications.
This job, or rather non-job, basically involves burnishing the image of the local NHS trust and will probably be responsible for other less well paid but ultimately unnecessary PR minions below them and responsible to a Director who is probably on a lot more than £73k. Like all bureaucracies, the NHS grows unnecessary administration positions like an untended field sprouts weeds and spends money that could and should be spent on patient care on fripperies like this.
Public relations should be a secondary job of the trust’s senior management and not hived off as a separate and highly lucrative position especially as the NHS has a virtual monopoly on healthcare in the UK and doesn’t really need to sell itself or overcome competition. Those Britons and in particular the residents of the county of Kent, need to think, whilst they are waiting for ages for medical appointments or fearful of being treated like dirt in hospital, about exactly where our money is being spent. In my view and probably the views of others as well, a service that should be recruiting and training more quality medical staff should not be wasting money in this particularly worthless manner.
