Bloated middle management is just management consultant talk. The NHS is already under-managed. Other industries are similar. Someone on the outside that has no idea how things actually run assumes everyone that isn't doing the core work (in this case seeing patients) is unproductive and expendable bloat. What happens every time is a load of jobs get cut, the frontline becomes less productive and then roles are created to do those jobs that were cut again. It saves a load of money in the short term (if you exclude the redundancy costs) but in the long term they all get hired again because they weren't doing nothing but you also have several years of demoralised, overworked and stressed staff that don't know if they will be at risk and/or will be given twice as much work to do as they already have.
Everyone seems to assume everyone else in their business is useless and unproductive. Managers think staff aren't doing enough. Staff think managers are rubbish and a waste of space but in the majority of cases most of those people are needed which is why they were hired in the first place. Everyone thinks HR or IT or Finance just get in the way. They all say they are overworked and overstretched but don't realise that by getting rid of people they will have to take that work on and it will make things worse.
It wasn't really mentioned anywhere yesterday but they also announced they will be slashing jobs at the ICBs. That makes a bit more sense because CCGs merged into ICBs so there will be some crossover although those roles were being phased out through restructures and attrition anyway. It will be interesting to see if they stop asking for so much information from providers which could reduce workload but my guess would be that different department structures will want different data in different ways which is going to create more work for providers as we'll lose the knowledge that people have.
thread get so much traction? ( I get the irony of my one post adding to the total)
