NHS workforce - It ain't rocket science

A stockbroker once said to me "the key to successful stockbroking is not looking at the companies financials/forecasts/market but rather its looking at these in conjunction with whats happening in our world through media reports, this influences the stock market more than individual company performance- it ain't rocket science".

He was demonstrating that statistics on their own are meaningless and in order to gauge the true picture one has to look at external influences and supporting evidence.

A case in point is the NHS workforce, if we are to believe the 'official' statistics, we now have record number of nurses in our NHS - so press headlines would reflect that ...

"Ward accidents increase as nurses falling over each other" 

"Patients complaining that they can't rest as too many nurses caring for them"

said no newspaper ever


Joking aside - we are told we have an increased nursing workforce add to that the huge number of bed closures and add those two together would give us a greater nurse to patient ratio.

BUT if the latter is correct then we would not have headlines like this .... National Health Executive

or this ... The Mirror 

and we certainly wouldn't be seeing the need for this ... The Telegraph 

All external evidence suggests that the government statistics are wrong  ... and they are

but you don't need a degree in mathematics to know when the government is lying about numbers; all you need to do is see if external reports support their statistics.