LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Health Costs
Sta,—The views of Dr. Ffrangcon Roberts are, I think, incontrovertible, although his statement of them in the Spectator of March 10th may be rather misleading. One might suppose that the enormously inflated costs of the so-called Health Service were due entirely to an increase in the variety of medical services supplied to the public. Nobody with a first- hand knowledge of the present situation would agree that this is the whole explanation or even the major part of it, at least as far as the hospitals are concerned. A fantastic sum is being spent on what is euphemistically called "administrative staff," which consists of large numbers of persons employed to perform the functions previously per- formed by a small number.
Each " group " has now a group secretary, in addition to several administrative officers in each hospital ; finance officers ; supplies officers (who do the ordering of supplies which were previously ordered by the pharmacist and other necessary members of the staff of the hospital); appointment clerks who do fairly well what the out-patient Sister used to do admirably ; and, by no means the smallest item, hosts of shorthand- typists who use up innumerable reams of paper in sending out the minutes, &c., of all those committees, without whose works of supererogation the British hospital system had become one of the finest and cheapest in the world.
It is, I think, unfair to assume that Mr. Aneurin Bevan and his galaxy of civil servants, medical and otherwise, are really extravagant persons, although doubtless they enjoy spending other people's money, as do most of us. No ; the whole trouble is that neither Mr. Bevan nor his henchmen know enough about hospitals and their proper functions to be able to distinguish what is worth having (proper medical care) from what is not worth having (innumerable administrators, 'clerks, records and, indeed, parasites in general). The costs of the hospital service could be enor- mously reduced, without diminishing its medical efficiency one iota, if at least three-quarters of the administrative staff were dismissed, so that the total number of these necessary evils was no higher than in July,
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