Efficientised to Death

Here is how Daveybloke and his cuddly chums are protecting frontline staffing levels in the National Health Service: they aren't. According to a survey last month, almost seventy per cent of NHS nurses believe that staffing levels in their workplace are insufficient to provide adequate care; though presumably the lack of care falls with appropriate proportionality on the inefficient, non-private variety of consumer. "There is no excuse for hospitals that don't have enough staff on the wards," blustered Jeremy C Hunt's Department for Health and News Corporation. "There are now more clinical staff, including more midwives and more health visitors, in the NHS but we cannot sit in Whitehall and dictate exactly where these staff members should work." There is actually more of everything than ever before, but entrenched bureaucratic attitudes prevent anyone outside the Government from noticing. "Hospitals need the freedom and flexibility to decide on how many staff to employ, because they know the care their patients need," and the five thousand nursing posts lost since 2010 have made no difference to that freedom at all; while the twenty thousand million required in "efficiency savings" will merely enhance the hospitals' liberty in targeting care at the consumers who really matter.