The Lucy Letby case is the latest stick to beat NHS management with. Heres what the critics overlook
The Guardian Knives are out for NHS managers. The case of Lucy Letby the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six other infants has become yet another opportunity for NHS loathers to expostulate against it. NHS management is a bullying, incompetent cult, proclaims a particularly virulent assault in the Daily Telegraph, ending: If its managers remain untouchable, how long before theres another Lucy Letby?
As I wrote after Letbys conviction, this was a horrifyingly freakish criminal case. The lessons must be learned impulse risks becoming a general stampede against NHS administrators. Of course, the inadequate should be removed, but beware cheap rabble-rousers looking for savings by cutting feather-bedded public bureaucrats, pitting them against saintly frontline doctors and nurses.
One problem: a third of hospital chief executives are clinicians, so stoking culture wars between medics and managers is tricky. Do doctors and nurses go to the dark side when taking on managerial roles, or is it rather a good idea? Prof David Oliver, a former clinical vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians, notes that in the Letby case, the chief nursing officer, chief executive and division director at the time of these events were all qualified nurses. The medical director was a registered medical practitioner.
