Hazel Blears MP - Chairperson of the Labour Party
As regular readers of Simplicity Blog will know I am one of the greatest critics of health service managers but I cannot help but feel for my ex-colleagues when I read the latest soap opera. Click here for the story
The Government has been putting pressure on managers to make the NHS more efficient, reduce costs and increase efficiency. I believe there is still plenty of slack in the system with potential to redistribute millions of pounds to make the service more efficient and patient-centred.
The biggest problem for NHS managers has always been interference from Politicians who seem intent on ‘dabbling’ in the everyday running of the service instead of letting managers get on and manage things as they are paid handsome sums to do.
So it comes as no surprise, to me anyway, that Hazel Blears MP who is Chairperson of the Labour Party and presumably therefore fully signed up to her own Government’s agenda on health should stand outside her local hospital that is threatened with closure as a protestor along with other members of the public, I suspect managers in Hope Hospital, Manchester must feel like they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
In the NHS, managers are often sacked for not carrying out Government policy and yet when they do just that, we see the Chairperson of the Labour Party no less opposing what her own Government is recommending!
Madness! - They could not write a better soap opera script.
It also makes a total mockery of the concept of letting managers in the NHS get on with managing.
For once my sympathy is with NHS managers and my three word summary - What a joke!
