The new NHS - or how to stick to a budget.
Saturday, April 8th, 2006The exalted managers (or headless chickens as I prefer to call them) who run little fiefdoms in the NHS have come up with a new wheeze to save money. Having carried out a review of the activity of the service & analysed the costs, they have found that wages are the main element and decided that they could come in under budget if there were no staff & therefore no pesky patients to treat.
In what appears to be merely the first publicly reported incidence of this approach being piloted, managers at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS trust who run West Cornwall hospital in Penzance decided not to replace the duty doctor when he called in sick on Friday. Ambulance crews were told to take seriously ill patients to another hospital 35 miles away at Treliske, Truro.
A spokeswoman for the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust said: “We have got a financial recovery programme in place at the moment; This doctor went off sick and we decided as a result not to hire a locum. We considered the financial aspect of this first and foremost. We have a statutory duty to break even, and this is part of our plan to reduce costs.”
Ah, the wonderful world of British bureaucracy, I wish someone would pay me to dream up things like this!
(The background to all this cutting down to size!)
Loading ...
