THE CURSE OF MANAGEMENT

Everyone knows that the National Health Service employs too many managers and too few nurses. Enter any saloon bar in the land and you will be told as much. But this popular wisdom finds shockingly emphatic confirmation in a new pamphlet, Resuscitating the NHS, written by Dr Maurice Slevin, a cancer consultant, and published by the Centre for Policy Studies. Dr Slevin points out that since 1995 the number of senior managers in the NHS has increased by 48 per cent, and the number of managers by 24 per cent, while the number of qualified nurses has increased by only 7.8 per cent. In September 2001 the number of management and support staff employed by the NHS was 269,080, compared with 266,170 qualified nurses. The NHS employs about four and a half times more managers, administrators and support staff in proportion to its nurses than a large private hospital in central London does.