How glorious it is to have the State in charge of a sector of the economy. For only the State can take a long-term view of matters. The private sector would just muddle along without taking those necessary decisions to ensure the achievement of the better society through proper planning:
Medical school places will double and thousands of apprentice doctors will be trained on the job under NHS plans to deal with chronic staff shortages.
An NHS workforce plan due to be published next month warns the health service will be short of more than half a million staff without the biggest boost in training for a generation and radical changes to how it recruits frontline professionals.
As we’ve been pointing out for near a generation now the increased feminisation of the profession has implications. The feminisation is a joy, of course, it’s part of the economic liberation of women, that wondrous event of the past century. But it does have implications, years off to have children, years of part-time working when the ickles are young and so on. Any planning system worth its salt would have increased the number of training places to match that - for any rational planner would have noted that more heads need to be trained when fewer lifetime hours of labour are gained from each head trained.
Medical training in Britain is a state-planned area of the economy. That rise in training did not take place and that’s all we need to know about the efficiency of State planning - it isn’t.
So, let’s not use State planning given the evidence of how well it doesn’t work then.
There is also a more minor point to relish here:
One in eight new doctors will qualify through apprenticeships by the 2030s as the NHS creates a new path into the medical profession for people who do not come through the traditional A level route.
Sensible enough.
A pilot is due to begin soon of training courses that allow nurses, paramedics or others working in the health service to train on the job for five years before taking the same exam as other medical students to become a doctor.
Why not?
The plan envisions thousands of such apprentices qualifying every year in the mid-2030s.
Apprentice nurses will see an even bigger expansion with a quarter of new students qualifying this by under plans to offer a better career path to healthcare assistants and other staff.
Ah, yes, that was the bit we were looking for. For it is only a decade and a bit more back that the decision to insist all nursing training should include a degree was taken. That’s now being walked back upon in favour of the older system of learning by doing.
Why not just go the whole hog and rescind that error of making nursing a graduate entry profession and go back to training nurses as we’re going to be training them anyway, by getting out there and doing nursing?
For we have already proven that State planning isn’t efficient, is capable of error, the most important thing about errors being willing to admit to them as that first step to reversing them.