NHS consultants are getting paid a lot more to do a lot less work...)o:

NHS consultants 'work less for 25% more pay' - Independent

Extract:

"Consultants working in the National Health Service in England have enjoyed a 25% increase in pay while seeing their workload fall, the Whitehall spending watchdog disclosed today.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said it was "regrettable" that the new consultants' contract, agreed in 2003, has so far failed to deliver promised improvements in productivity and patient services.

The NAO said that the implementation of the contract in England for the first three years had cost £715 million - £150 million more than the Department of Health originally estimated.

In that time, the average consultants' pay rose to £110,000 - an increase of more than 25% - while the average number of hours worked fell from 51.6-a-week to 50.2 - a 1.4 hours-a-week decrease. "

You couldn't make it up, could you?

Suggestion: - since the National Audit Office tends so regularly to turn up this sort of Alice in Wonderland pay anomaly with regard to doctors' pay, wouldn't it be a good idea for a member of the NAO to be co-opted to the government's negotiating team, so that the doctors' negotiating team - so skilled at screwing massive overpayments from the public purse - would have somebody with some sense to stand up against unbridled avarice?


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Patients experience very little benefit despite huge increases in cash for the NHS.

Patients miss out as NHS cash floods in

Extract:

"Billions of pounds of taxpayers' money pumped into the National Health Service has gone on improving the salaries of GPs and consultants and paying for increased pensions rather than on improvements in patient care and frontline services.

A damning report by the highly respected health think-tank, the King's Fund, reveals that productivity in the health service has actually declined, despite the huge injection of cash.

The report reveals that only 30 pence in every pound of the Government's record NHS budget has been aimed at directly improving patient care. As well as salaries, the rest has gone on a growing bill for clinical negligence payouts and rising drug costs."

Patients seem to come last in importance for the NHS. Doctors' pay and drug company profits seem to be the priorities.