Letters: Who’s at the top of the NHS?
[Re: Our healthcare leaders need financial acumen to start to fix the holes in the NHS, August 16]
The people working in our healthcare system should be able to balance budgets, but they should also have more public accountability when they don’t.
The governor of the Bank of England has been heavily criticised for failing to meet an inflation target of 2 per cent. And yet when the NHS doesn’t meet its own targets, we blame the government for not funding them properly. This is partially true, there isn’t adequate funding, but there is also no one to blame when things go wrong. Could you name the head of the NHS? If you google it, sure.
But how many people now know the name of Andrew Bailey? Yet so few could say the same of Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England. And no one would suggest she should be out of a job.
Alex Day