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The government has brought in a number of consultancy firms since launching its flagship pledge to build 40 new hospitals by the end of the decade.

KPMG and Deloitte are among those with published contracts, as well as engineering consultancy Mott Macdonald. McKinsey has also reportedly been involved.

HSJ asked the Department for Health and Social Care how many “management consultants” were working on the programme – which has been hit by numerous delays – last year.

They said there were 209 full-time equivalents in November. This was two thirds of all staff on the scheme, with 121 people from DHSC and NHSE on the programme.

DHSC said numbers will naturally fluctuate depending on the demands of the project. Indeed, the number of “management consultants” was even higher in September at 266.

It also said consultants on the scheme bring expertise “on a range of subjects including technical design and construction”.

Even so, the use of consultants by government departments has been under scrutiny for years – even by ministers themselves.

Steve Barclay ordered urgent cuts to spending on consultancy firms just last summer. 

The times they are a-changin’

With the health service stretched to its limits, it is little surprise fewer staff ticked the “strongly agree” or “agree” box when asked if they would recommend their organisation as a place to work when faced with the 2022 Staff Survey.

Not that things were spectacularly rosy back in 2018, but 61.7 per cent recommended where they worked, compared with 57.4 per cent in the 2022 survey.

But just how much this view has changed depends largely on who you ask. Among acutes, 24 have improved their score over the past five years, while 84 have a lower score in 2022 than they did in 2018. The rises are also smaller than the falls.

However, if you ask those working for a mental health trust, the answer is more complimentary, with 34 trusts having improved their score compared with 10 with a worse score. Meanwhile, just one community trust has a 2022 score lower than its 2018 – and even then, only by a fall of four percentage points.

But if you query somebody from an ambulance trust, you’re unlikely to get a cheery answer – all but one trust has a lower score in 2022 than it did in 2018.

Also on hsj.co.uk today

In our new column The Mythbuster, Steve Black says that in a single day the NHSE director of strategy claims that the system wants more autonomy for ICBs… while defending strategic decisions that strip them of any capacity to be autonomous. And in news, we report that trusts will significantly expand their capacity to treat clinical waste in-house to improve national and regional resilience.