Moving Targets

We learn today that one hospital accident and emergency department in six is fiddling its data in order to meet - you've guessed it - government targets, and this from no less an authority than the British Medical Association.

Half the doctors who took part in the BMA survey said patients were being moved to "inappropriate wards" to get them out of A&E as soon as possible; 40 per cent of doctors said patients had been discharged too soon. In other words, a car accident victim might come in with the apparent symptoms of whiplash. Ten years ago, he would have been given an X-ray; now he might be packed off home without one, only to discover that he was suffering from a more serious injury. Enter a lawyer (or, in extreme cases, an undertaker).

The Government would no doubt respond that, 10 years ago, the public was scandalised by the dangerously long waiting times in A&E. How is it supposed to speed things up without setting targets? It's a fair point.

What is not fair is that, in various areas of public policy, the legitimate business of setting targets has been handed over to control-freak managers, many of them specially recruited for the purpose and paid salaries that would raise eyebrows in the private sector, let alone the public one. It is not unknown for a surgeon to find a patient added to his or her schedule of operations by an administrator, not on grounds of clinical urgency but to meet a deadline. Meanwhile, school teachers are about to have "challenging" (i.e. uncontrollable) pupils dumped in their classrooms in order to meet the targets of office-bound social engineers. There is a pattern here.

It was, of course, the Conservatives rather than Labour who discovered the joys of targeting; some of this mess is their fault. But not much of it. There is a fine line between genuine utopianism and the use of our taxes to employ ideologically committed box-tickers and finger-waggers. This Government has not so much crossed the line as leapt across it, totting up public-sector votes as it does so.

This is a disgrace, and it is a measure of the Tories' renewed confidence that they are finally drawing our attention to it. A future Conservative government will have to set targets, but only after listening carefully to doctors, teachers and other professionals. In the meantime, there is an election to be fought; Michael Howard should unleash his attack dogs and send them racing in the direction of New Labour's client state.

source: The Telegraph (Last Updated: Monday, 14 March, 2005)

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