The NHS is poorly administered and the typical solution to that is to employ another adminstrator/manager to sort it out.
One of the essential problems is that doctors are medically trained and, as such, have had little time to learn basic management (let alone admin.) principles. Doctors like to hang onto 'power' in a management sense but are too busy 'saving lives and stamping out disease' to engage in management issues to the extent that would allow things to be run sensibly. Because they feel that they should retain power over how things are run, this causes them to undermine management decisions taken by managers (who are usually paid a lot less than managers in the private sector and don't always have a good grasp of the 'front line' medical issues).
Then you get the internal politics. Which are incredibly filthy. An awful lot of Empire Building goes on, within departments, between departments and between directorates, as well as on the Trust vs. Trust level.
I've also worked in private hospitals. I don't think things work much better there. And, if I had the choice, I would rather be a patient in an NHS hospital. I have a lot of reasons for saying that. One of which is the experience my father had in a well-regarded private hospital where there were no medical staff on site for much of the time (because they were busily fulfilling their NHS contracts).
I don't know how you fix it. I wish I did.
Our CEO believes that the current government is in the process of deconstructing the NHS, whether by accident or by design. He gave a presentation on this (and its implications for our Trust) a couple of weeks ago. It was depressing. I found it depressing.
But then I freely admit to being a socialist and am fairly devoted to the idea of top quality healthcare, free at the point of need.
Re:
One of the essential problems is that doctors are medically trained and, as such, have had little time to learn basic management (let alone admin.) principles. Doctors like to hang onto 'power' in a management sense but are too busy 'saving lives and stamping out disease' to engage in management issues to the extent that would allow things to be run sensibly. Because they feel that they should retain power over how things are run, this causes them to undermine management decisions taken by managers (who are usually paid a lot less than managers in the private sector and don't always have a good grasp of the 'front line' medical issues).
Then you get the internal politics. Which are incredibly filthy. An awful lot of Empire Building goes on, within departments, between departments and between directorates, as well as on the Trust vs. Trust level.
I've also worked in private hospitals. I don't think things work much better there. And, if I had the choice, I would rather be a patient in an NHS hospital. I have a lot of reasons for saying that. One of which is the experience my father had in a well-regarded private hospital where there were no medical staff on site for much of the time (because they were busily fulfilling their NHS contracts).
I don't know how you fix it. I wish I did.
Our CEO believes that the current government is in the process of deconstructing the NHS, whether by accident or by design. He gave a presentation on this (and its implications for our Trust) a couple of weeks ago. It was depressing. I found it depressing.
But then I freely admit to being a socialist and am fairly devoted to the idea of top quality healthcare, free at the point of need.