Health bureaucrats’ nonsense is laughable

24 November 2014

Health bureaucrats’ nonsense is laughable

The nonsensical statements spouted by DHB bureaucracies in trying to justify their ever-expanding management empires has reached new heights with the WCDHB's latest production of a supposedly new administrative position of "General manager, people and capability", according to DSC health spokesman David Tranter.

The job description for this position is loaded with meaningless mumbo-jumbo which fails to conceal the fact this this is not a new or different position but is merely yet another HR manager position. The job description itself spells this out when it states: "The role of General Manager People and Capability leads a team that supports those who care for patients" - in other words, HR. Yet again the DHB is re-inventing the wheel - and in management terms probably replacing the round wheel with a square one.

Making up new titles to create an illusion of "progress" in management is nothing new since the long-proven public hospitals management structure based on the knowledge of the chief medical officer, senior nurse, and hospital manager was ousted by the post-1993 corporatisation of hospital management with its multiplicity of managers-for-everything and endless IT (information technology) which turns the simplest process into a jargon-laden jungle.

Regarding the latest pretend position one wonders just what is meant by such expressions as:
• "People strategy that is aligned to and enables the organisation direction".
• "Positive constructive relationships within the human resource function and across the organisation".
• "Business partnering - support in the business for managers and staff”.
• And perhaps the most nonsensical: "Establish the change imperative". And there are three pages of this sort of drivel.

People familiar with management systems before the corporate madness takeover in the early 90s will recall when the staff or personnel manager was identified by those logical titles. Some may say, what's in a name - but the mushrooming management hordes which accompanied the change of language have destroyed one of the outstanding features of public hospitals - happy workplaces where there was no upstairs/downstairs, management/health professionals demarcation of employee status.

Noted American academic Northrop Frye stated that "there is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language". As one of the pubic health system activists who remember the way public hospitals were run before the corporate hordes descended on them, I believe that the meaningless drivel pouring out of administrators' mouths has, to use Frye's word, "degraded" the working environment in the public hospital system, Mr. Tranter said.

Having observed what is happening from the position of a twice-elected local member of a DHB board I believe there is downright class snobbery in the health sector whereby management has become an end in itself and where those in power are increasingly under the delusion that they - and not the health professionals - are the key people in the hospital system.

We have taken health administrators' pompous statements and meaningless jargon seriously for far too long. Since they appear to believe their own nonsense it is high time to simply laugh at them when their words deserve that response, Mr. Tranter concluded.

ENDS

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