The NHS is still recruiting thousands of workers, including scores for so-called non-jobs such as “change facilitators” and “sustainability officers”, despite the looming cuts to the public sector.
Salaries offered by health trusts for website editors, performance support officers and staffing resource facilitators exceed £40,000 — double the wage of a junior nurse.
The ongoing recruitment boom in the NHS will add weight to critics who have attacked the coalition government’s decision to “ring-fence” the health service from spending cuts. Other departments are expected to see their budgets cut by about 25%.
More than 7,500 jobs were advertised on the NHS central jobs website last week, including a “sustainability officer” to “actively implement energy-saving initiatives” at Luton and Dunstable Hospital Foundation Trust. The post comes with a salary of up to £40,157.
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A trust in Oxfordshire is one of several advertising for a “change facilitator” with a salary of up to £34,189.
The job spec reads: “Supported by the rest of the transformation team and led by a transformation lead, the role will require detailed process-mapping work within all the clinical and non-clinical teams, advising on best system practice and ensuring clinical and non-clinical practices are supported, [and] overcoming resistance to change.”
Lambeth Primary Care Trust is seeking two officials to discourage residents from smoking. One offers up to £33,041, the second an annual package of up to £40,046.
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust is looking for an editor for its website on a salary of up to £46,374. “We save an awful lot of money on printing forms by using our website,” said a spokeswoman for the trust.
Figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics show that the number of NHS administrators increased at three times the rate of nurses between 1998 and 2008.
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In many cases trusts are advertising full-time posts to perform duties that were previously carried out by management consultants, hired on a temporary basis.
The Department of Health recently published figures showing that it had spent £487m on management consultants in the past five years.
The Royal College of Nursing has calculated that across the NHS’s trusts and other bodies a further £350m a year is spent on management consultants.
Over the past year quangos such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the NHS’s drug- rationing body, and the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) have also hired dozens of staff, accounts published in the past few days show. By the end of March this year Nice had 390 staff — up from 297 the year before. Four of Nice’s staff are paid more than the prime minister. Sir Andrew Dillon, the chief executive, is paid £195,000 and has a pension pot worth £1.8m.
The NPSA last year increased its head count by 16% — hiring 49 new staff. A spokesman said it had been asked to take on more regulatory duties by the health department.
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Alastair Scotland, the NPSA’s director of the national clinical assessment service, is paid more than £145,000 a year and has a pension pot worth £2.5m — one of the largest in the public sector.
Andrew Haldenby, director of Reform, a think thank, said the government’s decision to spare NHS funding from the wider cuts facing the public services was “illogical”.
“The cost of running an unreformed NHS is rising by 7% or 8% a year, but the coalition government plans that NHS spending will rise by 1% a year,” he said. “Without proper reform, this is an equation for disaster.”