You can always rely on Frank Dobson. Whatever the issue, whatever the facts, the former Health Secretary has a wonderfully consistent ability to hone in on precisely the wrong end of the stick. Speaking on the BBC yesterday, he described the Government"s plan for "hit-squads" of managers to take over failing NHS hospitals as "shameful . . . the beginning of a slippery slope". The slippery slope leads, one assumes, towards the dreaded p-word: privatisation.
If only, Mr Dobson; if only. The truth is that yesterday"s announcement that three failing hospitals - in Bristol, Bath and Birmingham - will have new management teams drafted in is no more the end of the NHS than it is a worthwhile initiative. It is the latest gimmick designed to disguise the fact that the Government has no better notion how to "save" the NHS than to spend as much money as possible and fiddle around with ideas for increased efficiency.
Yes, it"s possible that by replacing managers with a new team, drawn from yesterday"s list of 71 approved organisations, standards will improve. It"s a staple of management theory that any change of managers will have some immediate benefit. But to think that this will somehow help to "transform" the NHS is startlingly naive.
This naivety is typical of a Government which, in its dealings with businessmen and "successful" managers, has all the zeal of the convert, and none of the scepticism of the realist. It thinks the mere stamp of "outsider" status is enough of itself to confer astonishing insight. Remember Derek Wanless, the NatWest banker appointed to look at the NHS, who managed to examine almost every health system across the globe and concluded that we had nothing to learn from any of them? Or Martin Taylor, the Barclays banker commissioned to look at taxes and benefits? His report gathers dust as the benefits system becomes ever more complicated.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with appointing new management to failing organisations. The Government is, however, trying to dress up what is basic common sense into something that Tony Blair would no doubt describe as bold, radical, and even transformational.
And it doesn"t even work. First, because the best hospital managers are already . . . guess what? Managing - in the best hospitals. As one senior NHS executive, in a thriving hospital, put it to me: "Why would I want to leave here to go and run a failing hospital in the middle-of-nowhere?".
Secondly, because there isn"t any spare managerial expertise just waiting to be tapped. Look behind most of the supposed "outsiders" on yesterday"s list and they turn out to be something rather different: ex-NHS managers who have discovered that if they clothe themselves in the suits of the private sector they can earn far more money for doing the same job - though no better.
Thirdly, on the whole the private sector doesn"t know how to do it either. How does anyone imagine that a management consultant would suddenly acquire the expertise to run a large acute hospital with a £500 million turnover? But they do want to learn. For what the private sector is after is the inside track.
The private sector views any hospitals it takes over as, in effect, loss leaders. It wants to be in position for the real changes, when it finally becomes obvious - even to Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary - that the NHS is not the solution, but the problem. The private sector wants, in short, to be in the operating theatre when it is not private managers to whom the Government turns, but private hospitals.



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