Is the NHS run by Morons? Basically, the answer is "Yes". And you know why?

Firstly, the NHS is usually run, managerially speaking, by the sweepings ofthe gutter. If you go off to university and get an honours degree, then do aMBA, or something similar and are half good at it, then you go and work forTouche Ross at £200 per hour. You do NOT become a grubby pen-pusher, papershuffler, and attender of unproductive meetings in the NHS. The NHS is theland of the managerial "Also Ran".

The other reason is that so many of the "managers" are not managers at all,but nurses or, occasionally, doctors who got bored with doing the properjob, for which they trained, and, suffering often from an inferioritycomplex, decided they would try and make a career in "management", wherethey can try to boss around people who were their former intellectualsuperiors.

Unfortunately, emptying bedpans and disappearing off for coffee breaks, andorganizing the off-duty rotas are not the best training for organizationslike Primary Care Trusts which have budgets of hundreds of millions ofpounds. Sometimes they have just got to the top of the tree in theirparticular area of nursing, but, like King Louis in the Jungle Book, have"reached the top and had to stop" and that's what's bothering them. Theythen have to go over to the management side to get further promotion. Theyare hopelessly out of their depth, and thrash around trying to lookcompetent, poor darlings. Funny how a nurse will refuse to do a clinicaltask, point blank, because she "hasn't been on the course", but give her abadge which says "manager" and she thinks she can do anything. They then seeit as their job to tell others, who still are doing dirty jobs actuallytouching sick people, and caring for them, how they should REALLY be doingit properly, and not in the way they currently are. These really are thelowest form of life in the NHS pond, other than thoseepsilon-grade-Quislings:- doctors who become "managers". These really are,in the words of the never-to-be-forgotten Nye Bevan, "Less than vermin",who, come the revolution, are the first that should be lined up against awall and shot.

Welcome to the world of Dr Rant....

Is the NHS run by morons?

Dr Rant is an NHS doctor, a battle-hardened veteran on the health service front line, and has strong opinions on the state of the NHS, and the people who run it.

Dr Cardigan is a gentle sandle-wearer of a doctor who thinks that all the NHS needs is love and understanding (as opposed to the carpet bombing and napalm runs that Dr Rant has lined up.....)

I'm Dr Pink, and I'm one of the Magnificent Seven Posse (or is it the The Seven Dwarf Helpers, I can never remember), and my colleagues - Dr Blue, Rev Dr Green, Dr Orange, Dr Purple, Dr Mustard, and Ms Scarlet - and I will be trying to bridge the chasm between these two extremes.