SIR - Andrew Brown lazily repeats the all-too-easy claim that "the NHS is burdened with overpaid administrators" without offering a shred of evidence (Worcester News, May 27). He is also blissfully unaware of the attrition-rate among chief executives and other senior managers during recent years.
All objective evidence shows that the NHS has far lower management costs than the private sector, and individual managers are paid substantially less than they could command in that private sector.
This is surprising, given that the NHS deals with more than one million patients every day, and that the consequent levels of complexity require a lot of managing so that doctors, nurses and other clinicians can get on with their job.
In any case, more than 50 per cent of managers have a clinical background. The strange caricatures that we see in Casualty and Holby City do not reflect reality. I, along with a fair proportion of my colleague chairmen and non-executive directors, have a private sector senior management background, and, without exception, we are all of the view that the NHS is chronically under-managed rather than over-managed, particularly given the huge change and re-organisation agendas and the very challenging clinical and financial targets.
Even so, the NHS is set to "lose" £250m worth of management costs by 2008.
DAVID BARLOW,
Chairman,
South Worcestershire Primary Care Trust.
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