28 April 2006
Managers have hit back at claims that the health service has too many administrators, following the release of the latest census of NHS workforce.
The census, taken in September 2005, shows the service employs 1.3 million workers across England, including 679,000 qualified clinical staff, such as doctors and nurses, and 220,000 infrastructure support staff – which includes 39,391 managers and senior managers and 105,000 staff in central functions such as finance and IT.
Since 1997, the NHS in England has created an additional 18,549 managers' and senior managers' posts but it has also added 120,000 qualified clinicians. However, questions were raised as there are now more managers than consultants (31,993) and a Royal College of Nursing survey found the NHS had identified 13,000 jobs to cut since October last year.
NHS Confederation chief executive Gill Morgan said if anything the health service was under-managed.
'As a doctor and a former NHS manager, I do find this obsession with managerial numbers baffling. The NHS deals with over 1 million patients a day. That level of complexity takes a lot of managing so that doctors and nurses can get on with their job.
'More than 50% of managers have a clinical background. The strange caricatures we see in Casualty and Holby City do not reflect reality. We need a more honest and sophisticated debate about the real challenges facing the NHS and the role of non-clinical staff within the NHS,' she added.
NHS Employers' director Steve Barnett said the growth in managerial posts had slowed recently and would fall this year following the expected cull in the number of primary care trusts.
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