NHS has a huge workforce but is performing appallingly

By George Tyndale on Mar 27, 09 11:07 AM

Of those of us who still have a job in the UK roughly one in 20 works for the NHS.
New figures show that the total health service workforce has reached an astonishing 1.36 million.

This means that the nation's biggest employer has seen staff numbers rocket by 27 per cent in a decade--that's around 300,000 extra jobs.

So if you are wondering where all that tidal wave of extra money has gone then it now becomes evident. If those extra people average just £30,000 a year each then their salary costs alone would be £9 billion.

The numbers employed--which include 35,000 consultants and the best part of 50,000 hospital doctors--is so vast that something like one in every sixty patients in a hospital or surgery must be a member of staff.

Around 5 million treatments performed by doctors and nurses each year must be on their own colleagues. And, incidentally, if the averages work out then the NHS kills at least three of its own employees every year and seriously harms another 300.

Even so those of us who are yet to get an NHS job are still forced to wonder how with this vast army of highly trained and lavishly paid personnel the service still manages to perform so appallingly.

Just a few days ago it was revealed that we still have the worst cancer survival rate in Western Europe.

Our infant death rate is appalling, the death rate among stroke victims is almost as bad, diagnosis of dementia takes longer than anywhere else and waiting times for surgery are still longer than in most countries in the EU. These are not just technical issues. One in five patients leaves hospital malnourished because of nursing failures--a figure that has doubled while staff numbers exploded.

How can so many people--a sixtieth of the total population---with so much money behind them still be failing the rest of us so emphatically.

Part of the answer might be that one of the greatest surges in staff numbers has been among managers. We now pay almost 40,000 of them.

But another revelatory insight into the misdirection and mismanagement of the service has just been given us by Health Minister Ann Keen. Commenting on the vastness of the
NHS workforce she said "The NHS is the UK's largest employer and is making a significant contribution to tackling unemployment".

And there we were thinking that it was supposed to be making a contribution to healthcare.