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How to Liberate the NHS
wsj ^ | 7/16/2010 | isaac gertz

Posted on 7/16/2010, 6:13:13 PM by Nachum

Andrew Lansley's plan to break the bureaucracy of th National Health Service is bold, but risky.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley's NHS reform, announced this week, is the biggest decentralization of decision making ever undertaken in any organization. The idea of liberating front-line employees is a powerful and exciting one. The bureaucracy of the NHS is not just a nightmare for patients, but also for the doctors, nurses and other workers too. Patients only have to contend with it when they're sick. NHS employees confront it every day.

But trying to set the NHS free is also fraught with peril in an organization so large and bureaucratic. Announcing to staff that they will enjoy freedom and responsibility in their decisions without building a workplace that makes it possible is a formula for failure.

Building a workplace in which people are free and responsible to make decisions that they—not some bureaucrats or rules—deem to be the best isn't an ideological issue. It's an organizational issue that involves finding a form of workplace that delivers the best results for the clients, users, or patients. According to the early 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber, the "bureaucratic organization" was the best. He claimed that only a "strictly bureaucratic organization" was capable of discharging its "official business . . . precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible."

(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: liberate; nhs
Let's give them Berwick. He can help.
1 posted on 7/16/2010, 6:13:15 PM by Nachum
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To: Nachum

Great news! We really are on the heels of moving to what the NHS is doing, while the NHS is trying to be more like us!

Obama is a visionary of failure and Marxist Muslim theology.


2 posted on 7/16/2010, 6:21:27 PM by wac3rd (Somwhere in Hell, Ted Kennedy snickers....)
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