UK Anecdote: Where Does All The NHS Money Go?

I'd like to start by saying that I have absolutely no evidence to back any of this up, so I'll understand if you stop reading here. Oh also, this is a corporation bashing thread, not a government or welfare bashing thread.

Anyway, a few years ago at a friend of a friend's dinner party I met a guy who worked as a senior logistical advisor for a major pharmaceutical company who had a large contract with the NHS, this guy made a lot of money off the company, and in return made them orders of magnitude more.

This guy wasn't a manager in the traditional sense, he didn't tell people what to do directly, he was more of a consultant or advisor, his entire work routine consisted of analysing global prescription drug trends and seeing how they would affect the UK market, extrapolating data from things like previous orders and "in" diseases in order to predict the next major order to the company from the NHS.

Having successfully estimated when the NHS was going to place a major order with his company (he claimed to be rather good at his job) he then advised the company to move certain stocks away from the UK warehouses to somewhere on the other side of the EU, so that when the NHS ordered the medicine they could be charged 2-6x the standard price depending on the urgency of delivery, global availability of the drug in question etc.

This wasn't just a UK thing either, nobody was deliberately trying to shaft the UK, it happened to other countries too and was co-ordinated on a massive scale, the company just wanted to make the most amount of money in any given time period, so any one of their clients could have been done over just as easily as the NHS.

Now obviously when this came out to a room full of doctors, consultants and admin staff an icy silence ensued, followed by a short exchange of opinions on this guy's ethics. Throughout his unanimous condemnation from almost everyone present, this guy remained unapologetic, he did however have the good grace to take his cabal and slink off a short time later.

We are being swindled on a massive scale by the pharmaceutical companies, our tax money is actively being stolen simply by shifting stock around the world to make us pay more for it. The NHS is doing its best, along with our other emergency services, to provide round the clock care for us, and they're losing out on a massive scale because of a few dozen individuals at most.

The point I want to get across here is that the NHS is an exceptional service that is often railed against for being bloated and inefficient - the next time you find yourself saying something along those lines just think back to this thread. You can pull out all the funding figures you like, it doesn't matter how much money we funnel in to the service when they have to pay over the odds on everything because the sellers can get away with it.

Imagine if this didn't happen, how much money would we save? How many more lives would that money save?

Medical quality in the UK is being eroded by the greed of a few.

If there is a system put in place with good intentions, you can bet there will be those who will cheat, swindle, and bleed that system for all it's worth.

Corruption knows no bounds.

S + F for you!

It's not just that, a friend told me he works with 4 other employees in a local hospital, a menial job. They have 6 supervisors to monitor 4 workers. He told me they sit outside all day chatting, I have been to meet him 3 times now at work and have seen these people sitting in the same place talking every time. So I know it is true.

I would like to report this but I don't know who to.

reply to post by dmsuse


Ridiculous! It wouldn't even matter if you did report it, the individual chiefs of every department gain influence and power by having bigger budgets and more staff, they don't care how useless each role in the department is as long as it lines their own pockets, I just don't understand that mentality. I would rather have a lean and efficient system which frees up resources for where they're needed than have a few extra bodies under me to give me more say at the negotiating table.

I feel sorry for the workers at the bottom, which btw includes doctors and consultants who have to put up with this power struggle right above them every day. There are people in the NHS at virtually every level who are there to help people and make the world a better place, but they're impeded by the managers who hire other mangers who hire more managers to manage a workforce which is facing bigger and bigger cuts every day.