The NHS’s Mackey is just taking the mickey
Writing about our ailing NHS, I discovered that while readers are prepared to fork out more for a better health service they are also sick to death of tiers of parasitic management leaching money from the front line. I won’t induce a group coronary by asking how we all felt about The Telegraph investigation which revealed that the nine main NHS quangos are employing 628 officials on salaries of more than £100,000. Some 93 of those are taking home more than Theresa May. The PM is jolly well earning her £149,440 as the poor woman prepares to do battle with the multi-headed EU hydra, with her hands tied behind her back by an ever-helpful House of Lords. If only the same could be said for Jim Mackey, the so-called NHS Improvement chief executive, who is paid over £215,000. “What improvement, Jim lad?”, I hear you cry. Don’t worry. I have visited the NHS Improvement website to find out what this quango actually does. Warning: there now follows bad or intemperate language. NHS Improvement boasts of its “90 day improvement and innovation cycle”, which helped to “improve the data collection and analysis of patient flow metrics in real-time”.
English translation from PublicSector Bollocks (P-SB): “We haven’t got enough beds and there are lots of tiresome sick people lying on trolleys in corridors.”
I’m sure that will be a huge comfort to midwives in East Anglia, say, as they struggle to cope with a baby boom which NHS managers could have planned for, but didn’t. Probably too busy finalising designs for a brochure telling us how brilliantly the NHS is doing, if you don’t include the sick people.
NHS managers earning huge salaries while churning out reams of P-SB are an insult to nurses who have seen their pay fall 14 per cent behind the cost of living; to surgeons who can’t operate because there isn’t a single intensive-care bed available and, above all, to patients who have the worst cancer survival rates in western Europe.
At a time of crisis, the public wants to see all available NHS funds going towards extra beds and the recruitment of clinical staff, not specious PR. Can I suggest that NHS Improvement, along with other quangos, might consider adopting a methodology of departure and conclusive mind-set in real time.
Or, as we say in English: You’re fired!