Just a little tip for NHS managers everywhere

utter rubbish, i presume you've never worked in the NHS

99% of lay managers in the NHS serve no real purpose and could easily be replaced by secretarial support for Clinicians and Professionally Qualified Support service Managers.

What?? You can't write off 99% of people in a job as useless! Calling people 'lay' managers like they're dimwits is just insulting. Really no idea how to respond to this other than with general disbelief that you feel you can just dismiss all these people, it's kind of crazy. It may be traditional to hate on managers but you can't honestly think that they have no purpose. In the recent NHS reforms the government spent millions of £££ on firing and then having to re-hire managers exactly because they are necessary for the cogs to turn. And there already is secretarial support for clinicians. How is a 'professionally qualified support service manager' even different from another manager anyway? It's like saying I'll only let my bins be taken out if the bin man is a Professionally Qualified Waste Disposal Man, everybody else is a waste of space. Call it what you like, it's the same job, no?

What term would you prefer I use for managers in in healthcare organisation that are neither clinicians nor are they professionally qualified in a essential support service ?

...managers?

Considering the current NHS is built on a system of political wrangling, targets, hoop jumping and outsourcing, not having somebody in that role seems quite mad. Funding is based on meeting targets, managing budgets and collecting and acting on information about "tractor production", as you say. Without doing all of this stuff, hospitals don't receive compensation for what they've done and/or get fined so actually lose money. As I said at the beginning, blame the system, but the people who are trying to do all this stuff and make ends meet in the government's "competition" based system don't deserve all this dissing and hate like they're some conglomerate group of morons. They're actually stuck between a rock and a hard place because the actual shop floor 'service delivery' and meeting all of the things they've got to meet in order to fund the delivery of the service don't always go together. And so they get a lot of hatred from bitter people like yourself who assume they do sod all and are idiots. The clan-like blame culture in the NHS is totally unreasonable when it comes to stuff like this, it's shocking how little respect people have for each other.

I personally don't think that professional qualification in some support service or whatever really means much in this context. If you can do the job, it doesn't matter what your qualifications are because management is not a 'profession' in that sense. There's no special pool of knowledge, just common sense, an understanding of the system and people skills.

as a graduate, manager and health professional I can tell you that lay managers i nthe NHS do nothing of value to the organisation , and much of what they do is either unnecessary duplication of the work done by Health Professionals or support services professionals or work that should be done by admin staff reporting to the relevant professional

Honestly, I think you just don't know the whole of what managers do! It's structural stuff above the level of just providing frontline services.

It's how to improve services,

commission facilities, run facilities

, manage people

and situations.

The day to day bits like coding and accounting to tick the boxes for money is not the same as commissioning those services and allocating budgets in the first place.

Also surely this private company does therefore have 4 managers??

So other companies do need them, you can't have a large organisation without somebody over-seeing it, keeping tabs on it and giving overall direction. Indeed NHS managers are highly sought after by other companies, and much better paid.

Charities and other businesses DO also have management, including your 'lay' non-ex-nurse/doctor/hospitality managers who have not been elevated to this mysterious extra level that makes them worthwhile human beings, although in the Charity sector it's usually divvied up amongst employees so as not to appear on overheads. People don't donate to Charities which are seen to plunge a lot back into running costs.

It seems to me that your point is just that anybody who does not have the same qualification as you (i.e. trained clinically before ditching clinical work to then go into management) should be shunned as useless for some reason. I really don't understand your distinction between 'lay' and other management.

ask a lay manager what they do " collect information about how we are meeeting the targets " - they often don;t even realise why the targets they are measuring are irrelevant and detrimental to effective patient care

This is exactly what I've been saying!! It's the targets you have a problem with, not the people trying to make sure they're delivered.

however, and it's this us versus them attitude that ignores the big picture of everybody having their own job and that having to enforce things (e.g. targets) is an issue with the system itself, which is fundamentally based on targets and performance for payment. So if we're going to blast anybody with cynicism and rage, perhaps it's that and not the poor unfortunates employed to carry out these tasks.

utter rubbish, i presume you've never worked in the NHS

you really haven't got a clue have you ?

are you being deliberately thick?

how many years have you worked in healthcare, how many y ears of experience do you have a clinician ? how many years of experience do you have as a clinician with mangerial responsibilities ?

What is your educational level ?
Are you a educator as well as a practitioner ? are you even a practitioner?

Why are you getting so upset?

zippy is correct with a lot of points.

particularly worrying currently in the recession as some daft decisions are being made by management in the name of efficiency savings and then pretending it is 'modernisation'. hospital closures, bed closures, even even sacking front line staff - all results in worse care and the front line staff have to pick up the pieces from each new idea and change.

i think though many experiences nurses, and especially so of consultants, will never pick any management role. i certainly will not !! this makes it worse for the few consultants or nurses that set up as they often get all the slack. i hope the nhs stays alive but i think it is cracking

want a master's prepared Specialist Practitioner with 5 - 40 years experience or some spotty youth of a foundation Doctor with as little as a coupel of weeks in speciality ?

do you ewant a master's prepared Specialist Practitioner with 5 - 40 years experience or some spotty youth of a foundation Doctor with as little as a coupel of weeks in speciality ?

We always hear about how we need to cut the bureaucracy, fire the inefficient managers, not only in the NHS but in every other part of government.

We rarely hear about an actual example of a job that can be cut.

If you want to cut red tape, you need to give examples.

primarily because it requires the turkeys to vote for Christmas

how about starting with looking very hard at jobs that fulfill the following criteria

1. banded 5 -7
2. do NOT require a Professional Qualification [sic] (or be working towards one for the accountants and HR types)
3. do not have an actual output that can be explained in a few words.

That's so non-specific. Give an example of a particular person's job, or more practically a particular role/form/activity that definitively has no impact. Not just "figures", "numbers", "targets" - be precise. I've no doubt they exist, in fact I can think of a couple at my hospital, yet you haven't pointed to any. Arguing about nebulous "managers" is pretty pointless.