The Ebenezer Scrooge award for most inventive way of pinching pennies goes to McKinsey, which suggested the NHS should attempt to meet its challenge of saving £20bn in three years by… clamping down on GP tea breaks.
Although that suggestion only narrowly pipped another by, erm, McKinsey again – this time that GPs across London could solve the crisis in NHS capacity by simply cutting their appointment times by a quarter. Scarily, this proposal was adopted as a serious policy by NHS London, only to be canned, in a rare outbreak of common sense, after the general election.
