No problem - The thing is, those extra doctors and nurse numbers were put in place by a report from about 1990 called 'Tomorrow's Doctors' that called for the expansion of UK medical school numbers. They were just reannounced numbers from a plan put in place before New Labour were even born.
By squandered money I mean that compared to the amount of money they've put into the NHS the returns aren't as good as would be expected. Much of the money has gone in overpriced PFI schemes where the tax payer gets screwed as prices spiral and we pay over the odds interest to the private companies.
Then there's the spiralling number of NHS managers and the non-comprehensive targets firgures, designed so that resources are targeted at one figure at the expense of another, or where to meet a deadline figure for 'definitive treatment' patients end up getting suboptimal treatment (eg radiotherapy instead of curative surgery for cancer) simply because the hospital can more easily provide it within the specified time-frame. They do much better to increase the numbers of facilities and resources and staff and allow doctors to decide what the targets should be, rather than non-clinical managers who come up with meaningless targets to meet as instructed from above. Targets for targets sake, set by people who'll manipulate them to keep their jobs. It's nonsense. Just think of what could have been done with all the money this country made over the past 12 years.
