The health minister is cutting front-line services in Northern Ireland because of a “fundamental failure to tackle bureaucracy and inefficiency in the NHS”, according to Conservative Party spokesman, Mark Brotherston.
“With his latest plans to save money, Jim Wells is carrying on Edwin Poots’ strategy of stripping back front-line medical services, rather than taking on the enormous burden of over-administration and inefficiency which is crippling the NHS”, Mark argued. “If you look at the respective populations, Northern Ireland’s health service has 42% more non-medical staff - managers and bureaucrats - than the NHS in England. Our department of health spends £75 more per head than its equivalent in England. These are crazy statistics, yet successive health ministers have consistently called for more money, rather than getting to grips with fundamental problems around inefficiency and ineffective management.”
“If you talk to doctors, nurses and other medical staff, they will tell you how much money is being wasted in the NHS. They will also tell you about the absurdities and difficulties caused by labyrinthine management systems and services which do not join up properly. In England and Wales, the Conservative Health Minister, Jeremy Hunt, has successfully got more for less, by prioritising services, while, in Northern Ireland that work has scarcely even begun. Right across the Executive, the first instinct is to cut front-line services, rather than tackle public sector inefficiency. It’s a senseless way to govern Northern Ireland and it will have a particularly dreadful effect on health, where NHS professionals care for some of our most vulnerable citizens, burdened by costly and ineffective bureaucracy.”