For many years now there’s a been a reliable place for the NHS to waste money that should be spent instead on clinical services and that has been the diversity and inclusion sector. The NHS has wasted millions of pounds on diversity, inclusion and equality staff that do very little to improve the clinical outcomes of the increasingly long suffering end customers, the patients, of the NHS.
Worse still the NHS has done this whilst the service to patients who have to use NHS services has got worse and worse. It is my view that the hiring of parasitical staff in areas like Diversity, employees who have no positive impact on the clinical care of patients or the medical outcome for these patients, is a disgraceful scandal of waste and poor prioritisation of resources.
Creating unwieldy and resource wasting diversity and inclusion departments does nothing to help patients get to see a doctor or access any timely and effective treatment for their ailments. In fact it takes resources both human and fiscal away from clinical practise and into the plush offices of the parasitical creatures and creations of the NHS’s already over blown and unnecessary bureaucracy. For example: The cost of one senior diversity practitioner in the NHS, which appears to be around £60k per year, the NHS could hire two nurses on £30k per year. Personally I’d rather there be enough quality competent medical staff to ensure that patients get to have effective and humane treatment for their medical conditions than have some wastrel from a crap university like Bristol be employed by a hospital to scream about everything being racist and get in the way of the NHS’s real work which is treating Britons illnesses.
The waste of money that the NHS incurs via the employment of parasitical diversity and inclusion staff is bad enough but the NHS has apparently found another way to divert funds away from the clinical care of patients and into the pockets of middle class leftist activists. According to the blogger Tom Winnifrith the NHS has engaged on an orgy of hiring of employees who will promote adherence to the man made climate change cult within the NHS. Mr Winfrith has found (see image below) NHS posts for ‘Sustainability and Net Zero’ that have maximum salaries of between £60k and £108k.
None of these posts will do any good for the actual customers of the NHS that is the patients. They will take not one day or one person off of the increasingly long and heavily populated waiting lists that have built up whilst the NHS became in large part a covid only health service. We have a situation at the moment where approximately 6 million people, that’s roughly 7.5% of the British population is currently languishing on an NHS waiting list, denied the timely access to effective treatment that they’d paid for through taxation. Like Mr Winnifrith I feel utter disgust that the NHS, in just one region, the South West of England, can spaff nearly a quarter of a million pounds on ‘sustainability’ staff whilst pleading poverty when criticised for yet another NHS failure.
Britons deserve to get the health service that we pay for. We deserve effective and humane treatment delivered to us in a timely and appropriate manner. The trouble is that all too often we do not get this. Instead we get a money pit, run for the benefit of NHS staff and dominated by the non-clinical obsessions of those who occupy management positions. We all deserve better than what the NHS delivers or rather fails to deliver.
On pain of repeating myself: the NHS is a top-heavy, self-serving bureaucracy which has been allowed – or instructed – to ignore the reasons for its existence.
Yes of course, I see your point, but the salary of one diversity officer v. two extra nurses is not going to make a lot of difference to the structural problems of the NHS in the UK and the wider issue of the competition and tension between private and publically funded healthcare. It might be interesting to compile a pie chart to see what proportion of NHS spending goes on these ‘non jobs’ as you define them, as a proportion of the whole? Another way of looking at it is that the NHS hasn’t gone bonkers and the Diversity Officers help with recruitment and compliment the HR teams with prevention of potentially more expensive discrimination tribunals? The TPA type argument against the degree of waste in public services never really gained a lot of traction if the proportion was looked at and possible hidden advantages. It’s like the emotive conservative argument against foreign aid whist ‘our pensioners are freezing’ – a cut in the foreign aid budget would only give some of them something like an extra 50p a week for a limited period.
@Marian
Pie Chart? It is facile to say what percentage is spent on non-jobs irrelevant. NHS puts a value on patient life: ~£30,000pa. Two patient lives are lost for each £60,000 Diversity Officer. Same applies to “Green Crap” jobs – they kill patients
Discrimination tribunals? The Diversity Officers encourage and help with bringing cases before them and help recruit staff with grievances. They don’t only add nothing to NHS patient care, their cost and actions drain more money destined for patient care.
TBH All you wrote is fantasy land utopic fiction. Why do you promote non jobs which kill patients?
Ok, you now seem to have a statistic that Ethnic Diversity Officers kill patients. Goodness knows where that comes from. My point was that Ethnic Diversity Officers may be cost effective if they help with the recruitment and training of ‘ethnic’ staff, who may then go on to save a lot of lives?
Far better to take no account of the ethnicity of potential recruits and simply hire those best qualified for the job. The answer to racism isn’t to hire proffessional racists to oversee recruitment. With both this issue and the net zero nonsense, you are quite simply defending the indefensible.