THIS diagram – reproduced here in all its glory – illustrates perfectly what is wrong with the National Health Service.
Leaked by a member of the staff at St Barts Hospital – it has links with the Royal Free and Whittington hospitals – it exposes how woefully the NHS is overstaffed by senior managers.
Roughly, according to this diagram, there is one manager for every eight doctors in the ‘anaesthesia directorate’.
In the departments covered by the diagram there are more than 300 doctors, and about 40 managers.
For some time members of the medical profession have been warning of how top heavy the NHS is with pen-pushers.
If you traced the cause you’d find it would go back to the Department of Health (DoH).
The DoH is under government orders to improve the management of hospitals to meet targets and schedules – and the only way to do this, according to Whitehall civil servants, is to fling more and more managers at the beast.
Gossip among hospital doctors is that many of these managers have little experience above that of a clerk or a salesman – they they are in charge of junior doctors and seasoned consultants. This fits in with Gordon Brown’s strategy of reducing the unemployment figures by boosting the public sector. In the past two years public sector staffing has swollen by nearly 900,000.
So everyone is happy – the Whitehall bureaucrat, Gordon Brown and the legion of managers who have moved into the NHS.
But judging by the MRSA scandal it is hard to argue that NHS hospitals are well managed.
What patients need are more doctors and nurses!

Modest Avis really is an extraordinary Londoner

KEN Livingstone gets to thank “extraordinary” Londoners next week for their contribution to life in the Capital.
Among them will be 88-year-old retired nurse, peace campaigner and advocate for positive ageing, Avis Hutt.
Avis (pictured) has been put forward by Primrose Hill Neighbours Help centre for more than 23 years work as chairwoman and volunteer.
“I don’t feel like an extraordinary Londoner, there are nine million of us,” she told me at her Primrose Hill home. “But I’m very touched to be nominated.”
It was a typically modest response, but extraordinary is spot on, especially when you consider Avis’s humble beginnings – as a foundling.
“I was found outside Paddington work house in 1917 and taken in as a baby,” she told me.
Adoptive parents, barmaid Elizabeth and pawn shop worker Henry, then took her in and as soon as she was old enough Avis became a nurse at Mile End Hospital.
There she met surgeon and first husband Ruscoe Clarke and nursed Oswald Mosley’s fascists and their opponents in the same ward.
“The fascists were reading their paper Action on one side of the ward and the anti-fascists were on the other reading The Worker,” she recalls.
Avis became politicised soon after, combining work for the peace movement with her nursing career in industry and at the Royal Free and Middlesex hospitals.
“I was always a bit of a rebel with my background,” she says. “And I can truly be said to be a Londoner.”

The gloves are on for Hampstead’s Helen

I’VE always thought of Heath and Hampstead Society stalwart Helen Marcus as one of those people prepared to roll their sleeves up to help a good cause.
But when I visited her home in Belsize Park on Sunday, I didn’t expect to find her clad in bright yellow marigolds and elbow deep in the washing up.
There she was though, washing up tea cups used by the 80 or more curious visitors who had just traipsed through her garden – accepted for the National Garden scheme – and into her kitchen.
The visitors had been invited in to raise cash to restore another garden close to her heart – that outside nearby Hampstead Town Hall in Haverstock Hill.
The open day eventually raised £300 towards new plants and flowers, a fair return for a hard day at the sink I’d say, but then I didn’t have to do the washing up.

Bowled over by the barstaff as Arms win

I WAS a bit surprised to find there were no locals in the old fashioned, independent Dartmouth Arms in York Rise on Sunday.
Fortunately, it wasn’t due to a sudden and dramatic down turn in trade: instead, landlord Nick May had taken his customers to the Heath for the pub’s cricket teams inaugural match against the Wenlock Arms from Islington.
I am pleased to report the bar staff are as good at bowling and batting as they are pulling pints. Manager Matt Comben took two wickets for three runs in just four overs as the Arms got their rivals all out for 41.
We’ll see if it was just a fluke when the side take on the Duke of Hamilton from New End on July 24.