I welcome Sir Richard Storey's suggestion that NHS hospitals should reduce their administrative costs by sharing payroll and accounts departments (Letters, November 5).
I would not go as far as outsourcing the work to India, as Sir Richard points out some international airlines have done, but there is no reason why York, Harrogate, Northallerton and Scarborough hospitals cannot pool their resources to run a single payroll or accounting system.
Why stop there? Local councils and other public bodies could join or buy into a shared system and cut their administrative costs, thereby releasing money to improve their services to the public.
The Labour government wants co-operation between hospitals to replace the competition encouraged by our predecessors. Co-operating on cutting unnecessary duplication of bureaucracy would be a good way to start.
Labour MP City of York,
Holgate Road,
York.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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