The lunatics really have taken over the NHS asylum. What took them so long?
What's surprising isn't how swiftly the NHS squanders money on woke schemes, but rather how it is only now spinning off into its own orbit
There’s good news for anyone lying on a stretcher waiting for admission to A&E, who has been held in a queue for a hip operation or is pulling their hair out simply trying to book a GP appointment for a worrying pain down their left side. There may be no doctor to see you, but you may get to see a diversity officer instead. NHS England is proposing to set up three new departments, involving an extra 244 new posts. There will be an “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” department, one called “People and Culture” and another called “People and Communities”.
In other words, the NHS may often disappoint its patients, but at least in future they should all be equally disappointed, with all 57 ethnic varieties and 100 or so different genders ending up waiting just as long for treatment as each other. No doubt the new officials will find some way to fill their time, even though, as a leading oncologist at a London hospital recently revealed to me, doctors are already being forced to watch and re-watch 23 training videos, one of which, in his words, is “to try to bang into us that we are all born and bred racists and that we are full of unconscious bias”. He also told me that the first thing they are expected to ask patients is not “|where does it hurt?” but what personal pronouns they would like to be known by. He says he has been banned from asking patients where they are from – even though that often has clinical implications, with some conditions unique to some parts of the world.
What is so remarkable about the new initiative is that it runs directly counter to the instructions which have been given by our elected government. Two years ago the then health secretary Sajid Javid commissioned General Sir Gordon Messenger, a former Royal Marine leader, to conduct a report into the efficiency of management of the NHS. When it was published last June, one of the report’s recommendations was specifically to reduce the number of equality, diversity and inclusion roles. Javid was very happy to accept its findings and promised to reduce the number of such jobs, adding “in my view there are already too many working in roles focussed solely on diversity and inclusion, and at a time when our constituents are facing real pressures around the cost of living, we must spend every penny on patients’ priorities”. It was a cause enthusiastically taken up by Javid’s successor, Steve Barclay, who repeated the call for fewer diversity and inclusion posts last December.
But it seems that when it comes to the NHS our elected government doesn’t count for much any more. The health service has started behaving like a self-governed socialist state all of its own. The role of official government is simply to keep on handing the NHS ever more bounty – even though the extra billions are just feeding waste and wokery. When you start defining the spending of money as an achievement in itself – as governments increasingly do, boasting of how many extra billions they have fed into the NHS – you guarantee waste. If you want to shovel the maximum amount of money out of the door in the shortest possible time, it is easier to spend it on diversity and inclusion posts, for which our universities are pumping ever greater numbers of qualified graduates, than it is to spend it finding the clinical staff required to cut waiting lists.
