Ash
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Yes that’s true. But usually management changes are done under a banner of cost cutting. If one healthcare service were radically to decide that cost cutting shouldn’t be priority and that saving lives should be the money could flow into actual healthcare and not be endlessly messed about with by managers who are middlemen numerous and paid a lot on the basis that they will save money via their talents for making efficiencies.
But the problem with that is that the efficiencies that could be made are very limited and yet still somehow decades into this fad, not yet realised.
For example staff are going off sick constantly and dropping out of work forces yet managers in healthcare in general do not get upgrades to ventilation or air purifiers or staff and patients in N95s etc, they just let them go sick which is inefficient. But it does prevent proactive money spending. See also certain healthcare departments going without funding, because the budget can’t be found, then patients deteriorate into more serious illnesses and require other departments to spend 10,20,40…. times more to treat and maybe still lose their lives. I just don’t think that ‘efficiency’ means anything at all under these political conditions.
If a government is averse to public funding for public services, for countries that embraced neoliberalism for the last few decades this is the case, then the calls for efficiency are a useful sufficiently non specific sort of positive rallying cry, surely one cannot object to efficiency?
Yet that means one thing very pointedly, like a big drop down banner at a political rally;
WE ARE NOT PROMISING PUBLIC RESOURCES SUFFICIENT TO MEET THE POPULATIONS REQUIREMENTS. Like it’s completely unthinkable that the amount of money it would take could or should be spent on alleviating suffering and saving lives. Of course the small print banner which is rarely seen would necessarily say, ‘so therefore some of you will have to suffer your lives away and die of the treatable conditions we feel it prudent and efficient to draw the line and say no more no more.’
So it’s true I agree healthcare is incredibly inefficient in terms of delivering health and safety and life enhancing life saving care. But healthcare can’t be left to capitalism and capitalists and state supporters of capital interests and still represent an efficient vehicle for care and treatment. Because money is going to be price gouged out of the system at every opportunity. The drug prices paid, the insufficient PPE because that’s where the ideology the politics is or the body or hospital didn’t find capacity for it in the low budget for health and safety, whatever. There it’s a money wasting inefficient system from the perspective where you’re not a corporate entity benefiting.
People who value most of all efficiency, in the sense of rapid delivery of all the expensive resources straight to the doctors and, on to their patients at speed couldn’t get or keep a high level management position. It’s not possible. Because to achieve and maintain such a career they would necessarily have to prioritise protecting the budget.
Under the logic of capitalism that means the immediate budget not the fall out that’s coming down the line following all the budget protecting corner cutting. That’s literally not your business.
When politicians and healthcare bodies talk about ‘efficiency’ it’s never separated from cost cutting, for a reason. It’s not a good sign. That why I think it has to come down to money first efficiency second. Survival first.
