A few weeks ago I was playing a charity function for a local Hospice and
the band were just killing time as the show was running late; it gave us a chance
to have a chat which we don’t really do very often.
The band is made up of professional people and they are the group that
feature in my book ‘Notes on Business’. The conversation had wondered onto the
subject of the education system interestingly not because of me but the
vocalist started complaining about the problems with the latest raft of meddling
from the government.
The bass player who is a pediatric specialist started talking about the NHS
and he quoted a figure that in his words the government had ‘wasted’ on NHS
reforms; the figure was a jaw dropping with the current reorganisation
costing somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 billion pounds.
In the last thirty years there have been at least fifteen
major structural changes in the NHS. Even if we take the lowest of the
estimates for the cost of the latest reorganisation, and assume the previous
were less far reaching, so each cost on average say, £500 million, that's still
at least £10 billion in thirty years, with no evidence of any long term gain
for the patients.
I suppose it is good to know that it is not only education
that the government waste money reorganising.
Vic
