Doctor shows army of ‘pointless’ forms burying NHS hospitals

“Pointless” bureaucracy is helping hospitals grind to a halt, a leading doctor has warned. Dr Gordon Caldwell, who has just retired after 40 years as an NHS hospital consultant, said “horribly inefficient” paperwork around patients moving in and out of wards is fuelling record delays. The senior doctor took a photograph of all the forms required for one medical admission to an NHS hospital, laid against his 5ft 10in frame.

Dr Caldwell said promises by the NHS to “digitise” the health service had simply seen needless bureaucracy transferred on to poor computer systems that were often incompatible with each other.  The specialist in general medicine and diabetes endocrinology said: “A few years ago there were estimates that nurses were spending around 50 per cent of their time on paperwork;  now I’d say it’s closer to 70 per cent.” “It’s bureaucratic and it’s very slow and horribly inefficient,” he said.

Dr Caldwell said the rise of unthinking officialdom was one of the factors that led to his recent retirement. Too often, dozens of forms were produced with little thought given to duplication, or how to obtain the key information quickly. He said the issue is one of the reasons why whole days are lost to admission and discharge of patients...Read more

Have you felt that needless bureaucracy affects you from treating patients properly?