The true cost of NHS management starts to emerge.

At our last resistance meeting at the infamous Café Michelle a couple of items from the local papers were discussed. The first item was from the local equivalent of the Times Higher Educational Supplement, the Shiteton Sun, and for the less well educated but more culturally and artistically aware, the second was from the Shiteton Stoat Tickler’s Gazette the local equivalent of the Guardian.

The articles discussed were regarding redundancies in those most essential for frontline healthcare provision the NHS managers whose numbers have doubled over 10 years at the same time as overall NHS efficiency has fallen 0.4 % per year and local GP numbers have been static. The figures are as follow as but in order to appreciate them you will have to do some seriously hard maths:

From the Shiteton Sun, it would appear that 50 NHS managers will be lost at the cost of c. £ 3 million or using our finger generated figures just under £ 60,000 a piece.

The Stoat Tickler’s Gazette says that in another part of Shiteton 20 NHS management jobs will be lost at a total cost of £ 2.13 million or about £ 106,000 a piece.

The average wage is just under £ 26,000 per year, a nursing sister earns up to £ 27,190 and your average GP earns £ 95,900 from this source but look how much your average GP really earns according to the Daily Mail - check the bottom line of the article for the "true" Daily Mail figure not the headline.

So these figures suggest that several of us here at ND Central appear to earn less than some now redundant local NHS managers' average wage but we deliver something they have never done in their lives - healthcare.

The total costs of all the managers in these two articles, £ 5.13 million, would provide full time frontline primary care for a total of more than 50,000 people provided by more than 120 staff from a variety of different professions including a total of 35 GPs and 25 nurses at an average cost of £ 40,000 per member of staff instead of just 70 managers. In under-doctored areas this would make a huge difference to peoples’ health.

This week we have also seen the first person made redundant as a result of (rapidly increasing) large local public service cuts. A young person just starting out in life but still upbeat for this was but the end of their first week of enforced redundancy. They felt they ought to let us know although this was not, as yet, their reason for attending surgery.

How will they be in 6 months when it is likely that their partner too will be in the same position? Both patients have a new family, a new house and a mortgage, have been sold a dream but plunged by the politicians into a nightmare that they have no control over? Even those that might be able to help them when the money gets tighter are being cut.

Have we as GPs seen this before? “Back to the Eighties” this film will be coming soon to all Northernshire GPs. Could this be a film with a thumping Huey Lewis theme tune as the legions of the Big Society march forward to save all affected by, but unhelped by, Big Government?

Still GPs are free and they will ultimately be to blame for the ConDem’s health policy success or failure. We will once again become those debt counselors, solicitors, social workers and employment advisers as the cuts deepen as we were in the 1980s. For when Big Government washes their hands of a problem where else can you go to for free?

Praise be to the Party for whom redundancies are short term gains but which will ultimately cost us all more especially in the NHS. Aren’t NHS managers such great value when compared with doctors and nurses?

No doubt these newly redundant NHS managers will be prostituting their "expertise" to the private sector to do what little they did before but for more? And who will ultimately pick up the tab?

Big Government or Big Society?