Wrong Comparison

Recently, the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Bruce Keogh, published his report into what might be done to turn around 14 hospitals deemed to be 'failing'. It was a very good report: clear, concise and featured eight actions that, if put in train, might improve not only the 14 hospitals in question, but many other providers that are teetering on the brink of joining them. Then, a few days later, he said this about the need for the NHS to do more with less resources:

“If you go down to PC World or Dixons, each year you would expect to pay less for a PC and you would also expect the specifications to improve. I have all sorts of people [in the NHS] saying to me: ‘Give me £1,000, give me £200,000; I can improve our service’. My challenge is: every other aspect of industry has to improve the quality they offer for less. So we need to change that mindset.”

Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with his stating that we (the NHS) will have to do more for less: that is, like it or not, a fact. With savings of £20 billion already fracturing the service and a further £30 billion that wiil, potentially, need to be found down the back of the sofa coupled with increasing demand, the NHS is going to have to do more with less. What I find a bit misguided is his use of the 'PC World and Dixons' analogy. Dixons disappeared from our high streets some while ago (are you trying to tell us something, Bruce?) and PC World...well PC World are hardly the business that I would like to be compared with. PC World is staffed by too many people who know little about the products they are selling, they are just interested in shifting units. On top of that, their aftersales service, unless it has vastly improved, is awful. As I say, it's about shifting units, not customer care, entirely the opposite to the model I would hope Sir Bruce would want the NHS to employ.

In addition, PC World merely ells the gadgets: it is not responsible (in the main) for the unit cost of those gadgets. That the cost of computer memory has dropped like a stone in the last ten tears is not down to PC World. The technology that PC World sells is getting ever cheaper. The technology that the NHS employs, whether it is drugs, devices, scanners of radiotherapy units, is getting ever more expensive. The costs of training the doctors and nurses to deliver healthcare is, I would suggest, increasing at a rate that far outstips the rise in the wage bill at PC World. To me, comparing the NHS to PC World and Dixons is about about as useful as all those people who say "Running the economy is just like managing a household butdget". It isn't, not even close. And the coming/current NHS funding crisis is going to take rather more to solve than staff rolling their sleeves up and 'piling it high and selling it cheap'.