The Annals of State Efficiency - Only 75 years late

We note this from the National Audit Office:

In June 2023, NHS England (NHSE) published its Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP). Based on an extensive modelling exercise, the LTWP estimated a starting shortfall between workforce supply and demand of approximately 150,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) NHS workers.

The important part of which is here:

For the first time @NHSEngland has produced modelling that combines planning its future services and planning its long-term workforce needs.

Now, government long term planning, we’re really pretty sure that’s going to be done badly. On the useful grounds that we know of absolutely no example at all when it has been done well.

But the British government has been in charge of the planning of the medical workforce since around the time of WWII. For it is government that decides how many doctors and nurses will be trained - they’ve long controlled the budgets for that education. This is, of course, why we’ve so many of both imported as domestic supply has fallen so woefully behind demand.

But put aside our prejudices about such planning. Put aside even the good or bad sense of it. Just relish the efficiency of this particular example.

The government, in that form of the NHS, is only 75 years late in having a plan for that thing that they’ve been in charge of all these decades.

And there are people who disagree with us when we mutter that perhaps government planning isn’t the way to do things, eh?