I have written before on the Daily Sceptic about the extraordinary amounts of our money NHS organisations are spending on hiring DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) directors, managers, assistants and other such personnel. According to one source, the NHS employed around 800 DIE staff. The direct salary cost is estimated at about £40 million a year. But when you take account of other employment costs – pension contributions, offices, computers, plus all the frontline staff’s time spent on various ultra-woke indoctrination sessions, the real costs of the NHS’s DIE colossus is easily over £100 million a year. Moreover, despite pledges to reduce DIE staff, the NHS keeps on recruiting ever more.
But a key question is – why are so many of these people being given well-paid, well-pensioned jobs at a time when the NHS waiting lists are at record levels, when patients are dying because they are unable to get treatment and when the NHS claims to be in crisis due to a supposed lack of funding. Several Conservative Health Secretaries have proclaimed that they were clamping down on DIE. For example, in October 2013 Health Secretary Steve Barclay told NHS chiefs to stop “promoting woke ideology”. At the time the Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed that Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust was spending £464,101 on DIE staff and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust had 10 roles costing £428,127. Other NHS trusts that spent more than £200,000 on equality and diversity roles included Barts Health NHS Trust, which spent £376,645 on seven roles, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, which spent £352,930 on eight roles and Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, which spends £307,181 on 4.4 roles.
More recently the Sunday Times reported (April 14th 2024) that Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust announced that it was running a deficit of about £84 million. Yet Guy’s had recently appointed a Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. I don’t know how much this important individual is paid. But there was also an Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion on a salary of £78,163 to £88,884 a year. So, I imagine that the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’s boss – the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – must be getting somewhere in the region of £100,000 a year.
The job specification for the Associate Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion stated: “The Associate Director will also be responsible for advising the Director for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion regarding equality and diversity issues, including changes to legislation, publication of relevant Government and Department of Health documents, good practice.” Forgive my ignorance, but I would have thought that, if the Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is pocketing around £100,000 a year of our money, then this Director shouldn’t need someone on a salary of £78,163 to £88,884 a year to advise him or her “regarding equality and diversity issues, including changes to legislation, publication of relevant Government and Department of Health documents, good practice”.
Perhaps we can find the answer for the seemingly unstoppable growth of woke in the NHS by looking at the requirements put on NHS trusts and other NHS organisations by the Health Secretary’s own Department of Health? From the little I understand, each NHS body is expected to produce the following:
- an “Anti-racism statement and commitment”
- an “LGBT+ inclusion statement”
- an “Equality, diversity and inclusion vision”
- an “Equality Impact Assessment”
- “Workforce Race Equality Standards” annual reports along with action plans
- “Workforce Disability Standards” annual reports along with action plans
- “Gender Pay Gap” reports along with action plans
Various NHS websites explain the purpose of some of these requirements:
- Equality impact assessments (EIA) help to make sure policies, functions and services are not discriminatory. NHS organisations have a legal duty to assess whether an EIA is needed and to publish the report and action plan on their website.
- The aim of the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) is to improve the experience of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff in the workplace. This includes items such as employment, promotion and training opportunities as well as analysis of levels of discrimination against the main ethnic groups.
- NHS England launched the Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES) in 2019. The aim of the Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES) is to improve the experience of staff with disabilities in the workplace The implementation of the WDES will allow NHS trusts to better understand the experiences of their staff. It will support positive change for existing employees and create a more inclusive environment for people with disabilities working in the NHS. It will also support the sharing of good practice and compare performance regionally and by type of trust.
Given the massive amount of woke bureaucracy imposed on NHS organisations by the Health Secretary’s own Department of Health, it’s hardly surprising that the hiring of DIE staff has been one of the fastest growing areas in our failing NHS. So, next time you hear a politician claiming to be clamping down on NHS administrative spending in order to focus resources on frontline patient care, you should perhaps take his or her sound-bite commitments with a rather large pinch of salt.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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“Walport’s review in the Royal Society of Medicine stated: “Lockdowns and face masks ‘unequivocally’ cut spread of Covid.””
For the benefit of anyone new, I don’t care whether they did anything of the sort, whatever could be meant by those words. Cut from what to what, at what cost, and what benefit? If “covid” exists then it’s a bad cold/flu. I’m not staying at home for that, nor am I wearing stupid nappy on my face. I don’t care if they work, the cost is far too high. Bring me the Black Death and I will concede we should interrupt normal life for a while, but not for “covid”.
As you know it was the CCP that locked down the Chinese Province of Wuhan along with mandating masks and mass testing. They also welded some people into their homes, while also forcibly removing others. They built emergency hospitals in days and dug mass graves using JCBs in preparation for the huge death tole. The WHO (and Gates) asserted that the CCP had done a good job controlling this virus with the intimation that the entire planet must copy China (see some evidence in Video below). Later on China introduced a ‘much better’ anal swab test, perhaps to see if they could get the rest of the world to follow China again and properly humiliate themselves.
No one checked whether anything China claimed was true and it didn’t seem to bother our leaders that China had locked down just one province even though the virus had escaped to the rest of the World. Miraculously, most of China remained free of the virus and remained open and it’s industries unaffected. All the tests and masks were made in China.
In the video below Kate Wand exposes Anthony Fauci’s connection with the CCP. It’s only 7 mins long and all worth listening to, IMHO. There is mush insistence that the world must not open up too soon and towards the end the Chinese Professor states that natural immunity will not work because it is unrealistic less scientific and inhumane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb-JExoBhmU
Fauci Follows ‘the Science’ | Kate Wand
Not forgetting, those who went to the pub were safe – only if they ate a substantial meal such as a scotch egg
For me that was the ultimate “jump the shark” moment when anyone who was going to wake up would surely have woken up.
We had lunch with some normies we haven’t seen for a few years the other day and at a certain point they started talking about bubbles.
‘They’ really played and ridiculed the populace didn’t they – and unfortunately, far too many failed the common sense test.
As long as you were sitting down.
If people would be ‘safe’ from a killer virus by eating a scotch egg – sitting down – why did the country go on a jabathon, jabbing the masses? People could have been encouraged to consume a scotch egg – daily – to the saying ‘a scotch egg a day keeps the doctor away’…or ‘a scotch egg a week makes BigPharma weep’
Absolutely spot on TOF. We decide if the cost is acceptable or not, individually, not our Servants from on high.
Stop infantalising us and let us make our own informed (or even ignorant) decisions. We have a right to choose the wrong choice, as long as it is OUR choice.
The trouble is a lot of our fellow citizens seem to want to be treated as infants and worse than that they want us to be treated as infants too – equality!
I do believe the latter group are a tiny, but very vocal and MSM promoted minority.
Zealots supporting whatever agenda
Far from tiny – expecting/wanting/hoping the state/government to solve all or many of your problems is pretty common in my experience.
I meant the group that want the government to dictate to everyone, not just their lemming selves, but you could be right!
Most covidians I spoke to back in the day were quick to condemn anyone “breaking the rules”.
The situation is exactly the same in New Zeeland and they are prepared to do it all again:
https://www.malone.news/p/new-zealand-lets-do-the-time-warp
My experience as an educator has taught me that change begins within. It is our inner experience that enables us to gain perspective, to re-evaluate and change gear. This is the need of our time.
This point was forcibly driven home for me this week when I read the “New Zealand Pandemic Plan: A Framework For Action.” This document has just been published by Health New Zealand, which is laying out NZ policy in the event that the WHO declares another pandemic. It is a prime example of an aspiring cabal of policy wonks stuck in the past, unable to change gears and move forward. For 211 pages, the document rambles on rubber stamping all the mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic response. It dictates that in the near future we will do it all again—lockdowns, masks, vaccines, antivirals, mandates, social distancing, isolation, school and business closures, and censorship of media content…
…Most chilling of all, the policy recognizes the power of a medical officer of health, in conjunction with the police, to detain persons in isolation by force and to continue to do so until necessary prescribed preventive treatment has been administered. You know what that means.….
Same reason the powers that be won’t investigate the destruction of nordsteam 2, or verify who actually voted for Biden in 2020 when the film 2000 mules shows ballot harvesting to drop boxes in swing states. If something is ignored one can almost be sure it is true. Get ready for another bout of vote rigging in 2024 via these mail in ballots without ID checks.
One way would be another ‘new’ virus followed by lockdowns and all voting becomes electronic.
Basic modelling shows that lockdowns result in lower acquired immunity leading to second waves. https://osf.io/y6ckv/
A cynic might suggest that if they say lockdowns are useless, they can’t do it to us again…
Well done, the two old geezers. It is worth listening to old geezers, could save huge sums of money. The taxpayer has already paid for all knowledge that might be required in this area by means of another astute old geezer. He was called D.A.J. Tyrrell and he ran the Common Cold Unit.
Regarding treatment of the common cold, he mentions:
‘local hyperthermia (inhaling water-saturated air at 43°C) has an immediate effect in improving symptoms but also a lesser effect that lasts a few days.’
Hyperthermia has, I believe, been used since Roman times, if not before.
He does not mention ‘lockdowns’ but gives us a clue as to the likely effectiveness of isolation:
‘…it was shown that colds could be transmitted from one end of a long room to the other when only air contact was possible…In recent careful experimental work, manual transmission in a group playing poker was prevented by using splints or large plastic collars; yet rhinovirus infection was freely transmitted, so the airborne route must have been of major importance in those circumstances’
He also indicates the major problem with vaccines:
‘This essay has focussed mainly on rhinoviruses, as the main cause of common colds. However, we know that coronaviruses as well as paramyxoviruses or enteroviruses also make a small but significant contribution, and there is a substantial fraction due to as yet unidentified organisms (Larson et al., 1980). This means that even if a highly effective specific rhinovirus treatment were developed it would provide no benefit for many colds.’
What, then, to do? Mr Tyrrell has a straightforward answer:
‘It is therefore arguable that in the case of infections like coronavirus or rhinovirus colds, which are normally quickly self-limited, the best approach would be to relieve the patient’s discomfort and disability and leave their immune system to take care of the virus.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016635429290032Z
We knew what to do. We had been doing it for millennia. It worked.
Unfortunately, as far as the dimwits in government (and now in this silly, ruinously expensive, inquiry) were concerned, this was not an unknown unknown, not even a known unknown, but, apparently, an unknown known……
Oh for heaven’s sake!
Spot on. It’s instructive to review what was done there in Salisbury, out to about 1989. They actually invented the term “coronavirus” as well, having detected them using election microscopy, which was quite new in the late 1940s.
“….ministers, lacking experience and expertise at the time, are kept in the dark by the reassurance of their advisers.” Isn’t that most of them, much of the time, especially if they change their jobs reasonably often? The Permanent Secretaries and the staff call the shots, most of the time, as long as it’s capable of being sold politically.
There are certain things that are diffiult to admit. There willl be no lockdown enquiry or anything like it. Maybe if we had a revolution and a simultaneous jump to a higher level of consciousness but that aint happening.
Because the RPTB.
“Let’s start with the 2011 preparedness plan. The inquiry correctly identifies the focus on a single pathogen (influenza) as one reason for its irrelevance.”
Wow. If that 2011 plan had been followed, the outcome would have been dramatically better than the fiasco we actually saw. That plan basically recommended what Sweden did.
This whole thing is ridiculous now. Everyone can see the events of 2020 were actually a national security response to the escape of an artificial pathogen from the US bio weapon research programme in Wuhan.