NHS held back by bureaucracy

I yield to no one in my respect and admiration for the front line workers in the NHS, nor in my gratitude to them. However, as I, and others, including many doctors and nurses, have pointed out, the effectiveness of the NHS has been undermined by asinine changes made in the past few decades.

The ever-expanding NHS bureaucracy, with its ridiculous number of so-called managers, has absorbed a vast amount of resources which should have been utilised to improve frontline services, without in any way helping patients.

In this they have been assisted by the non profession of Human Resources, whose malign influence I encountered in my years as chairman of our office union, which converted personnel departments, who existed to assist staff, into an

arm of management which rode roughshod over them, at the same time justifying their existence by producing countless absurd policies which actually subverted the efficiency of the organisations involved.

The malignant effect of all this has been thrown into sharp relief by the fact that retired medical professionals have had their applications to help out with vaccinations refused on the bureaucratic grounds that they may not have attended nonsensical courses on diversity, or even fire training.

Bureaucrats put their preposterous concerns ahead of effective action.

In addition, in the past, nursing was a vocation, recruiting from a wide spectrum of society, yet now we are told that one must be a graduate to be employed. This is as ridiculous as the need for policeman to have degrees.

Fifty years ago a large number of professions were staffed by those who learnt through apprenticeships and on the job training, yet now those who do not attend university are regarded as unfit for the very same jobs.

When I was last in hospital in 1955, they were run efficiently by the matron and the ward sisters but now they groan under the weight of useless paper pushers, while willing and capable nurses are lost due to unreasonable demands that they attend university.

It is time that the whole NHS was reformed to restore its original ethos.