The NHS needs MORE managers, says researcher: Hiring extra bosses makes hospitals ‘more efficient, improves patient care and reduces the number of infections’
- The NHS is ‘under-managed’ compared to the rest of the UK economy
- It has 31,000 managers to 1.36million staff – three per cent of the workforce
- Experts said more managers would improve patient experience and efficiency
- And they would also lead to a drop in rates of infections caught in hospitals
The NHS does not have enough managers and thousands more are needed to boost the quality of patient care, a researcher has argued.
Professor Ian Kirkpatrick, from Warwick University, said bosses in the health service deserve more credit than they currently get.
Hiring more has been proven to improve patient satisfaction, hospital efficiency and reduce infection rates.
Professor Ian Kirkpatrick, an expert in healthcare improvement, said the NHS is under-managed when compared with the UK economy as a whole (stock image)
Professor Kirkpatrick claimed the NHS is under-managed with 31,000 of them to a staff of roughly 1.36million.
He calculated this to be roughly three per cent of the workforce, less than the national average of 9.5 per cent.
For the NHS to meet the national average, it would have to convert nearly 100,000 members of staff into bosses.
In a piece for The Conversation, Professor Kirkpatrick argued NHS managers had been unfairly ‘bashed’ by the media and politicians.
‘Our latest research suggests that this negative view of managers is unwarranted,’ the healthcare improvement lecturer wrote.
‘Far from representing a “bureaucratic burden” on the NHS, we found that having more managers increases performance.’
He based his argument on the results of study he undertook alongside two other experts from the universities of Bristol and Leeds.
They looked at data from 160 English hospitals between 2007 to 2012 for the study, published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
Scores on the NHS Adult Inpatient Survey, rates of infections with the hospital bug C. diff and internal efficiency data were compared between hospitals.
This allowed Professor Kirkpatrick and his team to compare scores on each of the measures with how many managers each trust had.
‘The results showed that, across all trusts, having a higher proportion of managers had a statistically significant impact on performance,’ said Professor Kirkpatrick.
He revealed even a ‘small’ increase in managers, from two per cent to three per cent of the workforce led to improvements.
They found such a jump was linked to a one per cent increase in patient satisfaction scores.
While the results showed having more managers improved efficiency by around five per cent and led to a 15 per cent reduction in infection rates.
Professor Kirkpatrick said raising the proportion of managers in the NHS by just one percentage point would cost the NHS less than £500million each year.
He wrote: ‘This seems like a small price to pay, given the size of the NHS budget (£130 billion, annually) and the benefits reported in our study.’
Professor Kirkpatrick said managers in the NHS may get a bad rap because doctors blame them for growing amounts of paperwork.
This paperwork is generated by policies and regulations which, often, managers will be responsible for enforcing.
Doctors argue the admin work takes away valuable time they could be spending with patients.
And the Mid-Staffordshire scandal, in which 400 to 1,200 people may have died because of poor care, could also have contributed.
Managers at that hospital trust took some of the blame for the scandal, which happened between 2009 and 2012.
They were criticised for being remote and fixated on financial targets, Professor Kirkpatrick said.