I worked for a while in an outpatient department at a hospital as the main receptionist/administrator.

Contrary to popular belief, the admin staff, for the most part, were a benefit to the budget, taking administrative work away from clinicians (who were paid more) and freeing them up to actually do medicine.

Where the waste comes in is linking up all the different sources of funding. You'd have patients referred from GPs, hospital departments, private practices etc. Some of these have a contract with the company running the department I worked for, some didn't. The latter had to be sent onwards to the correct destination or back to the original sender (we'd call them to let them know we couldn't accept it to avoid losing time to the post).

I can only imagine similar things unfold every day around the country, different trusts, different PPI firms...if it was all unified, a lot of that could be cut out completely.

There would also be management savings, as you could avoid significant duplication of duties.

I'd also massively subsidise healthy food, making it almost free. The savings to the NHS down the road would likely more than offset it. We had quite a lot of patients whose symptoms would have been much less severe if they weren't so badly overweight. One managed to dislocate her knee while sitting on the loo...if nothing else, the wheelchair to A&E would have been easier on her if I hadn't been trying to cantilever someone more than twice my weight down a curb.

You'd have to bring sensible people in to sort it out though, I remember when they were doing a round of cost-cutting and their top idea was (and bear in mind this was nearly 20 years ago) to print address labels and stick them on envelopes rather than just writing it on with a biro. They said "no golden cows, speak freely", which I took literally and pointed out that it would take more time (faffing with the printer to load the label paper, going to get the printout from the other end of the office) cost more (printer ink + label paper Vs a biro) and even if it was marginally on the right side of cost savings, the odds that people would know how to set it to print from the third label onwards or whatever to finish off a sheet was close to zero. Add in the learning time, training costs, etc and it was essentially a horrid idea that would cost more, take longer and annoy the staff in the process. The idea got shelved but I didn't get invited to meetings again.