I hope every manager, doctor, nurse and porter employed by the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust watched BBC2's rivetting documentary last week which showed a leading industrialist attempting to introduce private sector management skills into the NHS.
Although the series was filmed in Rotherham it wasn't difficult to imagine that everything happening there was typical of the management incompetence that has created so much chaos in West Cornwall.
Indeed, the Rotherham hospital that bravely allowed Sir Gerry Robinson unrestricted access to its wards and operating theatres is one of the stars of the NHS, supposedly a shining example of efficiency.
But as Sir Gerry, a former chairman of Granada and Allied Domecq revealed, it was far from that. It was, in fact, shown to be run by dinosaurs and it took the plain-speaking industrialist just a few months to bang heads together, force through some common sense decisions and slash patient waiting times to almost zero - all without spending a single extra penny.
This series was an eye-opener and I hope it shamed every one of the 40,000 managers who are now employed within the NHS. I hope it also shamed Tony Blair and his ministers who have presided over an ever-worsening crisis within the NHS despite wasting more than £500 million in two years on management consultants.
One of the most frightening revelations that came out of interviews with staff at the hospital was that nobody knew who was in charge. The chief executive - no doubt on a salary of around £160,000 a year - runs the show in theory but the staff all believed the senior doctors were the masters.
Not surprising really because until Sir Gerry arrived and persuaded the chief executive to leave his ivory tower, walk the wards and talk to staff, very few had ever seen him.
Not surprising, also, that some of the senior medical staff didn't seem too enthusiastic about abolishing waiting lists. After all, waiting lists encourage more patients to go private. And many consultants spend at least a day a week moonlighting in private hospitals - like the Capio Duchy at Treliske, Truro - where they can earn £500-an-hour following working practices that, if adopted by the NHS, could end waiting lists virtually overnight.
Sir Gerry donates to New Labour - surprising, really, that he is not sitting in the House of Lords! - so hopefully Blair will take note of the Rotherham experiment Why not abolish the Department of Health and hand over the running of the NHS to someone like Sir Gerry (who, unfortunately, says he is too old to take on the job himself)?
*****
After watching "Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS" I read a follow-up interview with him in the Daily Telegraph.
Here are three quotes from Sir Gerry, talking about his time in Rotherham, that I am sure everyone who has dealings with Cornwall's NHS hospitals will relate to: n "Not carrying out operations on Friday afternoons was effectively cutting out 10% of the hospital's work time. Not only was it wasteful in itself, but as the NHS system now means that money follows a patient, so the trust hospital where a patient is diagnosed as needing surgery must pay for that procedure even if it is carried out elsewhere - you are not earning the money you could be. It didn't make any sense."
n Sir Gerry on hospital car parking charges and premium rate patient telephones: "When you concentrate on that sort of thing, you miss the point. Do a few more operations. Good management is concentrated on the big things - don't piss people off with the small things. Penny-pinching is a sure sign of bad management."
n Expensive management consultants should all be sacked immediately, says Sir Gerry. "If the people who have been working in hospitals for 20 years don't know what the problems are and don't have any ideas how to solve them, I don't know who does."
Don't let useless NHS bureaucrats or failed politicians tell you Sir Gerry is wrong. He proved his point at Rotherham.
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