"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"
Aneurin Bevan

Thursday 26 July 2012

Imaging the cutting of bureaucracy

The Conservative Draft Manifesto in 2010 said: "we will cut the cost of NHS administration by a third". This, apparently, was to be done by cutting management by 45%.

The Nuffield Trust have just released some slides showing how the NHS has changed since 2010 and what Lansley's new NHS will be like. I have extracted just the charts showing the organisations:


You can make the image bigger by clicking on it, but before you do that, have a look at the shapes out of focus. The left side has four types of organisations top to bottom; the right hand side has five (or six) types. Top to bottom are the layers of management. Lansley claimed to cut the layers of management, but he has clearly added to them. Further, if you look at the total number of organisations, the left side shows fewer separate organisations and the transition to the right shows more types of organisations: the system is getting more complicated. Bureaucracy comes from complication and Lansley's NHS is more complicated.

1 comment:

  1. In the interest of balance, the Labour Government pledged to reduce management costs by 30% in PCTs and SHAs over 4 years too (in the DH Vision Document NHS 2010–2015: from good to great. preventative, people-centred, productive - foreword by Andy Burnham, page 57, bullet 4.34).

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