NHS England to cut workforce by half as Streeting restructures

34 comments

1. This isn’t going to kill anyone.
   Nope not a single person will be harmed as a result

   Who’d-a-thunk that Streeting could be more of a duplicitous cunt than Hunt

   I’ve been all for stripping middle management and diverting funds to front line services, but this has the “hack and slash” stink of a Muskian DOGE move all over it

   Fucked if I’m voting for these cunts again.

2. That must be why Pritchard resigned. Didn’t want to take the flamethrower to the org.

   What was the Streeting quote in the election run up? Something about only Labour could get away with what they plan to do to the NHS?

3. Will the body collectors have to supply their own bell or will the government pick up that expense?

   🔔BRING OUT YER DEAD🔔

4. No money for NHS, no money for benefits but unlimited money for Zelinski’s war.

5. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wish catastrophic harm on this POS.

6. Better start clapping for the NHS again. See you on the balcony at 7?

7. Sounds terrible, actually i think this good. As someone who used to consult to NHS England, the corporate drag was insane. The trusts themselves were beholden to decisions made and managed at NHS England, which meant that the local trusts were not able to run independently.

   Granted I did IT projects but I was always horrified how “untouchable” NHS England was. Need support. Just log a ticket and hope for a reply.

8. Our army just fucked off and we need to build another one.

9. People need to stop seeing the word cut then getting angry.

   This is an organisation which is seriously failing in everything it is trying to do so there is no point keeping everything the way it currently is and throwing money down the drain. They obviously have a plan for what they want to do, so we should see how it plays out. At least they’re trying to do something.

   If this was a private company it would have been restructured 10 years ago. Public workers shouldn’t be untouchable like they currently are, if they fail they should be removed from their jobs just like you would in the private sector

10. I work closely with NHSE. Yes there are too many managers in the NHS, but this is going to effect those lower down aswell. Pharmacies, dentists, GPs the whole NHS cannot run without NHSE making decisions that other departments then act on.

    Losing half the workforce is going to create massive upheaval and decision making from the top

11. So they’re pushing us to vote Reform just like tories laughed us off and pushed to vote Labour? Lovely cycle.

12. No fan of Streeting but I support this idea. Less managers, more boots on the ground. See also all public services.

    But hey – the austerity tories said they would do the same. Nothing came of it,

13. Not a Labour supporter, but this is a good thing. Most people think the NHS has too many managers and none frontline staff who are draining resources. I welcome this

14. About time . I am a former NHS nurse and the amount of non clinical ppl in management,drawing huge salaries doing nothing is a major reason of NHS current state .

15. Couldn’t they just learn from up north and copy NHS Scotland and not have endless management structure changes?

    I think NHS-E has had three since 2010 and NHS-S has had none!

16. ITT – People who have only read the title and don’t understand these are civil servants in Whitehall not doctors and nurses. 

    It’s 6500 job cuts. Very unfortunate for those people but would we prefer it were frontline staff?

17. Article says NHS are/were projected to overspend by **£6.6bn** this year. Holy smokes.

    I’m curious to see if this delivers improvements. I do fear that A) this is just to prevent the overspend above and not actually designed for the benefit of anyone receiving care, or B) this is just KPMG or one of the other big firms who have no knowledge of the departments making recommendations for how to save costs after a 6 month consultancy stint commissioned by Streeting – likely from where he got his advice before the election. I hope I’m wrong.

    Feel bad for the people affected – hope this is done in a compassionate way to help people transition without stress. A lot of people are only a paycheque away from ruin.

18. I think the main thing the media suggests is wrong with the NHS is administrative/management bloat.

    Whether that’s true, I have no idea, but it sounds like a good idea from my point of view.

19. [deleted]

20. It’s nothing they’re not doing elsewhere and it won’t affect frontline delivery. DfE’s consolidating itself and taking back over the functions of the Education & Skills Funding Agency from March 31st in an attempt to cut down on duplication. NHS England’s been seriously bloated for years; I worked with some BI guys from a local trust and the sheer amount of things they needed to report to the mothership was eye watering. Did it make a difference? Probably not.

21. This is the cost of increased military spending. Gotta come from somewhere..

22. To add some clarity here, given that old NHSE England merged with NHS Digital and Health Education England over 2022-2024 and that ~40% of that merged staff base has been cut already, if this is a literal 50% on top of that then it equates to 90% of that staffing base being sacked. Which sounds great to some I’m sure….until you remember that those are actual people with mortgages/rent to pay and children to feed. Oh and some of them are responsible for sorting out training for new clinical staff running the digital underpinnings of the NHS that means your medical notes aren’t still faxed between your GP and the pharmacy or a hospital.

23. For those that care, it’s not just NHS England facing redundancies. Trusts are having to downsize its clinical and non-clinical staffing, too, in order to meet Streetings directive. If this was happening under the Tories, reddit would be fuming.

24. What type of jobs are being cut out besides senior management? Why are they so vague?

25. This is good news. NHS England is a mess and a gross disservice to the public

26. I’m sure this will inspire economic growth when job vacancies have stagnated and anything above the most entry level job has dozens of people are applying without a few thousand more being added into the pile. But this is Sensible Politics apparently. Dead eyed freak of a human that Streeting.

27. NHS England duplicates many of the Department of Health and Social Care functions – the idea broadly was that the latter create policy and NHSE implement it but in reality the boundaries of work were seldom so well defined and this led to duplication. It’s been a while since we’ve had significant central restructure – around 10-15 years but these things do happen from time to time.

    NHSE has been quite bloated for some time – an example is that they will implement a programme and undertake a half arsed evaluation and say how wonderful it is- and then DHSC will go ahead and commission an academic institution or a consultancy to undertake an evaluation of arguably better quality anyway. It’s nonsense and overall this is a positive move.

    That said, I’d be surprised if funding is redirected- it’s a cost cutting exercise. If it was it should be allocated to local health and care system boards (ICS) to boost ailing services.

28. My wife is really upset. NHS England just went through a brutal restructuring just under 2 years ago. The whole thing has been re-shuffled and alot of them had to re-apply for their jobs and have their departments moved around to streamline it all. Now this. She works damn hard and her job is important but screw it just upend her job security again because some idiot thinks he knows how to do it better than they did just 2 years prior.

29. This sounds like it could be good. There is a fat stack of money being sent that isn’t benefitting the NHS in any way and probasbly bogging it down a tonne so this change I really like.

30. Let’s just hope they get rid of the ones that aren’t needed.

    Yes Barbara, the assistant PA to the PA of the manager of procurement of rubber gloves, i mean you.

31. It’s a good and bad thing. Good because there’s too many over promoted incompetent people in positions of power and relative power, as well as too many people doing the same job (I spent 9 months in NHS England and spotted at least 3 people doing my job so I quit).

    The bad news is that the same people will now appear at Trust level or DoH level…. and so the spin/rinse cycle begins.

32. It amazes me how strong an opinion people have on the NHS’s problems despite never having worked there.

    I haven’t worked there so it’s impossible for me to comment on whether this is a good thing or not.

33. Despite what people like to say here the NHS has had money thrown at it over the last decade

    It’s now the 5th most expensive healthcare system in the world.

    Yet it’s failing big time. Sometimes more money isn’t the answer and cuts are necessary

34. There’s lots of discussion of the various merits of this going on in here, but just to provide a perspective as an NHSE employee.

    My role is essentially an internal NHS consultancy. We are commissioned to NHS providers that have either a) flagged as concern (performance metrics) or b) have asked for central support for a particular project.

    We are a team of clinical associates (i.e. consultants, lead nurses, physios, OTs) who work 1 / 2 days at week at NHS E and the rest at home organisations, or alternatively previous senior management in NHS trusts with significant experience in senior roles both clinical and non.

    We create the ‘headspace’ for organisations to evaluate their processes, offer best practice advice from other well functioning organisations, and have a catalogue of tools that we offer to organisations from process toolkits through to data modelling expertise.

    We do not fit under my understanding of the role of DHSC, so may very well be untouched.

    If we do dissappear, we will be replaced by your standard consultancy firms. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see many across my directorate get picked up by these private companies to offer the same at a higher price than current salaries in the NHS allow.

    Undoubtedly there is duplication, which the new NHS England programme (35% headcount reduction from 2023 to 2024) was meant to solve, but there are definitely parts of the organisation that indirectly assist with patient care via the functions that used to be NHS Improvement. A lot of the ‘middle management’ that I see at NHS E is a wealth of knowledge to be called upon at a fraction of the private consultancy cost.

    Streeting has previously said that NHSE would have to bear the same brunt that he is asking of providers, which I completely agree with – but this was a pretty radical change of tone this afternoon with the scale of the cuts – particularly when DHSC has grown by 50 civil servants a month since Streeting arrived (a message delivered quite cheerfully 5 minutes prior to Pritchard announcing the initial round of cuts to the tune of £170 million in January).

Comments are closed.