For what it’s worth, there are many fewer managers in the NHS than in other, better performing, health care settings around the world.
The lack of professional managers is actually part of the problem. It’s all well and good recruiting extra nurses but if no one is managing their deployment, the time tabling, the processes and performance etc then it becomes a tangled mess of inefficiency.
It is a horribly inefficient system though, employing something like 1 in 70 people in the UK, requiring an ever growing enormous pot of money (12% of GDP) and yet it performs worse and worse each year. The ‘save our NHS’ mantra of Covid has seemingly had the total opposite result.
I do subscribe, a little, to their being some terrible waste on none-jobs in the NHS, but as a share of the whole spend, it’s tiny. It’s already an incredibly diverse workforce, I’m not sure trusts need to spend millions on Diversity and Inclusion managers and practitioners.
I suspect there’ll be a change in rules for Trusts around use of agency staff. It’s become a very obvious rip off for staff to suddenly double their salary for the exact same role by being poached away from the job in the first place.
The biggest issue for central government to fix is social care. Fix that, even half fix it, and the NHS suddenly has masses of capacity. If you’ve ever spent any time in a hospital, away from A&E the wards are largely filled with elderly people who could probably be discharged… if there was just someone to support them at home.