The NHS and Royal Mail are a match made in hell
Your bank doesn't send letters ticking you off about your overdraft anymore. Neither does your lawyer, or your accountant, or anyone else for that matter. Even your birthday or Christmas cards typically arrive via your phone's inbox instead of the front door.
There is, however, one organisation that still finds a piece of paper delivered by hand to be the most efficient way to communicate: the NHS. Its spending on the Royal Mail is still soaring – with taxpayers footing the bill.
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting may still trot out his standard speech about how the NHS is a global leader in new technologies and how Artificial Intelligence will drive a new era of productivity. The reality, as so often, turns out to be very different.
We learned this week that the technology that the health service relies on is one from the 1840s: the letter with a stamp on it. Despite pledging to switch to a completely digital way of communicating with patients, according to research from the Taxpayer's Alliance the amount the health service spent on mail punched through £100 million this year, up by 12.5 per cent over the last twelve months.
Even though up to a quarter of the estimated eight million missed appointments a year were the fault of delays in the post, hospital managers persist in using letters as their main form of managing the system. The last quarter of a century of technological progress has completely passed it by. Indeed, at the current rate of growth the NHS will be spending £180 million a year by the end of the decade on the postal service, and more than £500 million by the 2040s.
Perhaps the takeover of the mail system by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky makes sense after all. While most of us may have imagined the postal business was in terminal decline, perhaps there is a fortune to be made as the booking system of the NHS.
The trouble is that it should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. In reality, the NHS and Royal Mail are perfect partners for each other. They are both relics of a different era, created at a time when we still believed that government-owned monopolies were the most effective way to deliver a product or a service.
They are both hopelessly inefficient and riddled with restrictive practices. They are both dominated by trade unions that are resistant to change; that protect their privileges with a single-minded determination; and bask in a sense of entitlement that justifies everything they do.
And they are both completely resistant to new technology, even if it could transform both the quality and the efficiency of the service they are meant to be delivering. They could both move with the times if they wanted to. But it would cause too much inconvenience for the staff.
Instead, they are perfectly happy to prop each other up – with the long-suffering taxpayer left to foot the bill for both of them.
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