Matt Morgan: The NHS needs to be less efficient

When I recently returned to the NHS after working in Australia for a time, I was dreading the process of endless applications for usernames, parking passes, and identification badges that lay ahead of me. Luckily, thanks to the NHS’s bureaucratic inefficiency, my existing usernames remained active, the car park barrier opened as before, and my ID badge still worked. Inefficiency worked well.Now that healthcare budgets in the NHS are glowing bright red, I imagine we’ll soon be hit by predictable plans to try to be more efficient by shaving decimal points off stationery budgets, outpatient clinics, and the free teabag policy. But we should remember the risk of suboptimisation—where individual process improvements end up being to the detriment of the overall organisation.Some of the most important parts of my day when working in the intensive care unit are the “in-betweens.” These are the gaps between here and there: the wait…
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