A cost rather than an opportunity

Another oldie from Nigel Hawkes, but a good one. Depending on in which part of the NHS you work, I doubt that much has changed.

Years ago I saw a statistic that the city of Cincinatti (population about 300,000) had more MRI scanners than the NHS (UK population about 64 million). I'm sure that the ratio has improved since, but bearing in mind that the innovations behind the clinical use of MRI were primarily British, it makes a good point. In fact, Hawkes makes a very similar point here, in this case about Japan.

Medics are not particularly slow to innovate, but their plans may well be derailed by management, who, as Hawkes says, generally are slow to innovate - they're usually firefighting. And that's because of the pressure from the government behemoth above them, as much as anything, combined with poor spending decisions, often as not.

You don't have to be Albert Einstein to recognise that "if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got", but funnily enough, it was him who said it.