Well, I was being a tad facetious with that sentence. I have a picture in my mind of massed ranks of Arnold J Rimmer clones jumping out of bed in the morning, exercising to the mantra 'I quest, I quest, I quest for Excellence', shortly followed by 'I must, I must, I must increase my bust'.
Stop posting lies and crap and maybe there wouldn't be a reason for 'abuse' as you call it. So back to these insurance polices you think everybody has .....
Yes I would, but with several caveats (that can be summarized as 'be careful what you wish for' if you are disinclined to read the rest of my rant, below).
Any restructuring would be led by the administrators. Most of the leading administrators are actually medics and scientists. The system facilitates the rise of a certain phenotype - excellent memories, a joy of detail, a willingness to do anything asked of them, manipulative, devoid of conscience....
Hard as it may seem, the NHS and higher education have regular shake-ups. My department has changed its name at least 10 times in he last 30 years. Even our staff meetings have changed their names (from staff meeting to departmental meeting to departmental teaching committee meeting to departmental education committee meeting; I shit you not) The way we purchase for research and for NHS purposes has changed multiple times, using new forms every year, new platforms every few years, and new process that means I don't buy anything myelf any more because I don't know how - I just ask my lab tech to do it for me. The way research is funded changes again and again (forms, process, funding streams, criteria). The way medicines are discovered and advanced changes year on year (in a bad way, in my view; and I am the owner of a patent on a new drug so have been through the very early stages of the process....it is life-diminishing).
So the problem is internal inertia, coupled with very little scope for access from the outside to identifying what to fix or how to go about fixing.
I'll give you an example the clunkiness at a level of minutia. More than ten years ago I was made chair of training and education for our 'clinical and academic grouping' in my therapeutic area. Because my therapeutic area is run by a reseach focused medic who isn't interested in 'teaching' I have had no support, no staff, no access to process, no invitations to staff meetings and no traction to achieve anything. It suits my head of therapeutic area (I note here that our place separates teaching and research so I am in one department for teaching and another for research).
By now you should be in a deep deep sleep.....
So, to effect real change, a very smart strategy needs to be introduced that operates by slashing and burning rules, paperwork, regulation, elaboration, flying buttressess etc at every level. Unfortunately the minute a boot is put in from outside the whole thing will grind to a halt.
And as an aside, sadly, for those on NSC who wanted to leave the EU to ditch all the red tape, the English are the absolute masters of creating red tape. We create red tape in order to organise a process to reduce red tape. We invent new red tape to monitor how the red tape reduction intiative is performing against a range of performance indicators. We create new red tape to evaluate the fitness of the red tape reduction performance indicators. We all know this
We have only ourselves to blame. My dear colleagues have spent hundreds of man hours on a Covid back-to-work plan. So, to access my office I need to book it, so that it can be assured by monitoring that numbers are regulated on my floor to facilitate social distancing (this is reviewed regularly as the definition of social distance is varied by HMG). My office is too small to have its own process written. So its process has been linked to that of a nearby laboratory. To book access to my office I therefore have to book the lab. I can't book he lab without doing a risk assessment for use of the lab. I have already done that per Covid, but we are in the process now of writing new risk assessments because of Covid. It is my job to obtain the old risk assessment and write a new one. That hen has to be sent to a committee for approval. It is a 30 page document. I also have to take an online Covid awarness training course. I can't do that till I have done the risk assessment. This process is recognised to be suboptimal so it will be reviewed by a subcommittee shortly. And you wonder why I have decided to stay working from home till we have a vaccine?
Are we ****ed? Not yet. Crisis is the best way of yielding disruptive change. I suspect that Dominic Cummings has that written above his desk. With that I would agree. I would much prefer the disruption be different and the objectives different though. No idea what DomCu has in mind for the NHS, o be fair. But you can't have everything....
As for the NHS specifically, I think too many in it are overpaid, and they benefit from the process and obfuscation everywhere, and contribute to the inertia. Attempting to make medics do anything, other than dispense medicine, in the hospital milieu is a fool's errand, though. I can email a consultant about teaching, for example, and 9 times out of 10 will get no reply. The secretaries (some consultants have three!) filter the emails. Those medics who do teach (and they are good people) do so in timetabled blocks so won't even look at a teaching email till the block opens. I have dropped medics from teaching on the courses I run (for science/medic students) because they are institutionally unreliable, don't mark exam papers transparently, go on holoday when they are supposed to be marking exams (because they are allowed) etc. Lovely people but the context and structure of their job means they are as much use to teaching as little Aaron Connolly would be to our back four.
Anyway, I could rant all day....
