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As the British NHS stumbles from one crisis to another, it's time to pay tribute to the unsung
heroes of the farce of New Labour's 'modernisation of healthcare'. These are not the doctors,
they're not the nurses - they're the armies of management and IT systems consultants that New
Labour have unleashed on our long-suffering health service.
Under New Labour, hundreds of millions of pounds have been taken away from frontline patient
care and given to management consultants. With their smart new ideas of targets, efficiency and
competition, these management gurus seem to create chaos and waste wherever they go.
Hospitals that are doing well are judged by the experts to have 'overperformed' and are forced to
close wards and slow down the rate at which they are taking in patients. Whereas 'hitsquads' of
management consultants are sent in to hospitals that are accused of 'underperformance'. Huge,
expensive new PFI hospitals are being built and then standing almost unused as operations are
transferred away from them to supposedly 'cheaper' private-sector healthcare companies.
Meanwhile surgeons are sitting around doing crosswords as their operating theatres stand idle.
And the introduction of 'contestability' and 'competition' has meant an explosion in the number of
managers and bean counters. This month the NHS could boast a truly shameful achievement -
under New Labour, the number of managers and senior managers have increased from around
20,000 to over 40,000. So there are now more managers than there are medical consultants
(31,993). Meanwhile, 10,000 newly qualified nurses can't find jobs.
But the squandering of resources caused by the management consultants is pocket money
compared to what the disaster the IT systems consultants are giving us. The NHS's new computer
system, once called the National Programme for IT and now sexily rebranded as Connecting for
Health, was originally budgeted at about £2bn and planned to take around three years. It
has now been underway for about seven years and NHS management say it will cost over
£12bn, though estimates of £30bn have not been convincingly denied.
So what are we getting for all these billions? Healthcare systems that will be the envy of the
world? Or just another massively ambitious and expensive government IT systems disaster? So
far the signs are not too encouraging. The first part of the programme, the simple Choose and
Book system allowing GPs to make hospital appointments, is about two years late, was budgeted
at£65m, has cost over £200m and doesn't work. The next bit, electronic patient
records should now be working in around 100 acute hospitals - a very minor part is running in less
than ten. Meanwhile, after years of discussions, doctors and IT experts still can't agree about what
information to put on the system. Moreover the system infrastructure is now so complex that a tiny
upgrade recently needed around three million manhours of work - this alone would have cost over
£240m, in fact, enough to pay for the 10,000 nurses who couldn't find work.
Most failed computer systems projects go through 4 well-known, exasperatingly predictable
phases. First there is Ambition - Connecting for Health certainly gave us that "we will deliver a 21st
century health service through efficient use of information technology". Then comes Pride as the
leaders mistakenly equate huge numbers of people using a lot of our money as progress. We've
had that too "we have mobilised a skilled workforce capable of meeting the challenge". After
several billions have been spent, the leaders realise it's not going to work and the Secrecy phase
sets in. At one press conference, the project management refused to admit journalists from the
UK's leading computer magazine. Finally as more billions disappear and little to nothing is
achieved, there comes Blame. There have been a series of undignified spats between the
Department of Health, the management of Connecting for Health and the main suppliers - all
naturally blaming each other for the impending meltdown of this great venture.
The systems that Connecting for Health should give us are all useful and should vastly improve
healthcare delivery and reduce administration. However, these systems are being developed in
exactly the same way by the same people who have already wasted tens of billions on so many
previous New Labour IT systems disasters. For the sake of our health service, we need to change
the way this monster is being managed otherwise we will see tens of billions of pounds siphoned
off from frontline patient care with the all too familiar spectacle of more closed wards, cancelled
operations and widespread redundancies.
David Craig is a former management and IT systems consultant who has been shocked by the
huge amounts of money the British government has wasted on management and IT systems
consultants. He is the author of "Plundering the Public Sector" which exposes how consultancies
have siphoned off about £70bn of taxpayers' money for projects which were mostly abysmal
failures and "Rip-Off! The Scandalous Inside Story of the Consulting Money Machine". He has
also written several current affairs books including "Squandered: How Gordon Brown is Wasting
Over One trillion Pounds of Our Money" (Constable 2008) and "Fleeced! How We've Been
Betrayed by the Politicians, Bureaucrats and Bankers" (Constable 2009). You can find out more
about his books, buy them, book him as a speaker to talk about "The Consulting Money Machine -
how to get value from and not get fleeced by your consultants" or contact him through his website
http://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_N_Craig
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