MEDIA WATCH

Lawks, wonders will never cease! Those of you old enough to read The Sunday Telegraph would have been delighted to learn that the Department of Health has issued orders to slash the numbers of primary care trusts.

What the paper does reveal is numbers: apparently the existing '400' will be cut down to 'as few as 128'. But can we trust the paper's number-crunching in view of the error with the inflated existing '400' PCTs (it should be 302)?

It is not quite fair to laugh at the Telegraph for being so late with this story - it would have been difficult to spot without keeping an eye on HSJ.

As previously pointed out (Mediawatch, passim), the national media finds it difficult to shape an NHS story unless it features beds, hospitals and lots of outraged doctors and nurses.

This is why the impending redundancy of legions of NHS managers has failed to hit the headlines. And when it does, it tends to be the result of DoH spin, as with the Torygraph story.

And is it just happy coincidence that a story and accompanying interview with NHS chief exec Sir Nigel Crisp about the cuts appears in the Torygraph? Surely this is a sop to Conservative voters and carries the message: 'We hate faceless bureaucrats too, ' and 'Look! We are getting rid of them all just like we promised'.

Cynics might say this is all the evidence one needs that Commissioning a Patient-led NHS is about nothing more than satisfying a manifesto pledge made in haste to fend off Tory cries of 'waste'.

Meanwhile, the story also reveals that Sir Nigel has spent£608,000 on 10 different consultancy firms to help him sack a few people and shift a few others as the DoH responds to the Gershon review. You may recall that its first step was to slash the number of NHS 'quangos', such as the Modernisation Agency, to save£500,000.

Spending£608,000 to save£500,000? Someone needs to go back to accountancy school.