Health secretary says bad managers are NHS’s ‘guilty secret’ in broadcast round ahead of first major speech on health service reform
The Labour MP Diane Abbott has suggested that Wes Streeting’s attacks on NHS managers are a pretext for further privatisation. She posted these on social media this morning.
Wes Streeting’s cascade of abuse of NHS managers and medics is a pretext for further and faster privatisation.
Just yesterday NHS chiefs told Streeting they have not been given sufficient resources to meet his waiting list targets. They are right – they have not.
Demanding unreachable targets when funds are inadequate will just deepen the crisis in the NHS.
Boyle said trying to compare the performance of NHS trusts in league tables was “surprisingly complicated”. He explained:
League tables is an interesting idea. Measuring good and bad performance is actually surprisingly complicated, especially since we’ve merged so many hospitals.
Back in 2001 each individual hospital had its own performance, and that could be publicly reported.
He said league tables could incentivise “short-term target chasing”, leading to less attention being paid to long-term reforms that are needed, such as integrating health and social care.
He said league tables could demoralise staff and harm recruitment.
There’s good and bad managers right across the NHS. It is good to have some form of accountability, because accountability is something which everybody within the NHS struggles to try and measure. So I think the right to try and do that.
There’s a difference between the intent and the way they do it. And there is a risk that this will demoralise stuff, and you will see that in poorly performing areas, recruitment and retention of staff, and that will go right down to clinical staff, will become even harder.
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