THE NHS is top heavy with managers, right? Grey bureaucrats who spend their days closing wards and consuming salaries that would be better spent on nurses or hospital cleaners.

Penny Humphris, director of the NHS Leadership Centre, which runs the health service management scheme, is ready for this one. It’s a familiar accusation. In fact, she says, managers constitute just 3 per cent of the 1.3 million-strong NHS workforce, and although that’s enough to fill a football stadium, clinical staff need someone to run the show for them. A job in NHS management is proving increasingly popular with young graduates, says Humphris. Indeed, the health service came fifth in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers list, published recently — not bad for an organisation whose headlines seem frequently to include the words “killer bug”, “dirty mop” and any combination of “trolley”, “corridor” and “my elderly mother”.

There are 6,000 graduate applications each year for fewer than 200 places on the NHS management scheme, which is made up of three strands: general management, human resources and finance. Humphris says the programme is attractive partly because potential recruits are looking for something more than all that money-making that preoccupies the private sector. “People want to make a contribution to public service and are thinking the big corporates are not for them. They want to make a real difference to local communities.”

Andrew Archibald had not considered a job in the health service before he wandered into a careers fair in the third year of his politics degree. He was looking for a good graduate training scheme and was unaware that the NHS even ran one. “But the moment I went to their stall it switched on the lights for me,” he says. “When I started talking to them I was really impressed. The NHS is just so high profile — more so than the blue-chip companies — and you are running a service that people rely on. I just thought: ‘Wow, that sounds really good’.”

Now, at 26, he is general manager of South Yorkshire Ambulance Service and says the two-year graduate programme prepared him well for the obligations his job carries.

His first placement on the scheme was in a district general hospital where he was soon managing 100 staff, a budget of £1 million, and drawing up a business case for a new cardiology department. His current salary is in the £35,000- £40,000 range — less than some of his university contemporaries but, he says, his post carries more accountability.

But be aware that NHS bureaucrat-bashing remains a national sport, so much so that unions and employers have united in a campaign to defend health service managers.

“The accusation that the NHS is awash with pen-pushers is not only misleading the public, it is damaging the morale of hard-working staff,” says Gill Morgan, of the NHS Confederation.

And Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, the public service union, says politicians on both sides try to out-tough each other over the number of NHS support jobs they propose to slash, “ignoring the fact that these are real jobs, done by real people with real benefits to patients”.

Data file

In a typical week, 1.4 million people will receive help in their homes from the NHS; more than 800,000 will be treated in NHS hospital outpatient clinics; 700,000 will visit an NHS dentist for a check-up; more than 10,000 babies will be delivered by the NHS; NHS ambulances will make over 50,000 emergency journeys; pharmacists will dispense 8.5 million items on NHS prescriptions; NHS surgeons will perform 1,200 hip operations and 3,000 heart operations.

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