The NHS could save millions and gives nurses the pay rise they deserve if it stripped out woke nonsense, says Mark Dolan

I’ve got a solution to the nurse’s strike. Give the nurses their pay rise – they deserve a bump - but find it out of the existing NHS budget.

After all, the NHS budget isn’t far off £200 billion, and amounts to a bill of £13,000 a year per household across the country.

I’m pretty sure that a bonfire of bureaucracy and the reduction of middle management – pen pushers on six-figure salaries, who have nothing to do with treating sick people - ought to do the trick.

Not paying a fiver for a packet of paracetamol or paying a contractors 50 quid to change a lightbulb, would likely help too.

People often boast that the NHS is the biggest employer in Europe. That’s not a boast – that is an admission of its wild inefficiency.

And the axing of woke job titles ought to free up a few hundred million too, like diversity officers, for a famously diverse organisation.

Woke projects - we are led to believe - cost over £7 billion across all government departments with the state sector, paying huge amounts of money for courses on divisive and controversial ideas, like gender ideology, which questions the very basic idea that there is a biological man and a biological woman, or critical race theory, again, a contested idea - that suggests you are intrinsically racist, based upon the colour of your skin.

A brave nurse called Amy Gallagher has taken the NHS to court on this very issue. The mental health nurse, who was in the final stages of a two-year course in forensic psychology, objected to a lecture entitled “whiteness – a problem of our time”, where attendees were forced to confront “the reality of white privilege”. In another lecture the following month, Ms Gallagher says that she was told that “Christianity is racist because it is European” by a talk leader.

Well, the NHS is full of this stuff. A review into how the health service and social care sector is managed, entitled The Messenger Report found that equality, diversity and inclusion were mentioned three times as often as patient care.

Meanwhile, the health service has spent more than £1million on hundreds of staff networks using taxpayers' money to put on events around transgender issues, sexuality and racism, often held during the working day.

These have included 'tea and rainbow cake' picnics, a special session about pronouns and a Filipino martial arts performance.

An audit by the TaxPayers' Alliance has found there are now almost 500 networks across the UK health service.

Don’t get me wrong, racism is the most evil scourge in our society, and diversity is a great thing. But we don’t pay the NHS to do tea parties at the expense of patient care.

Or paint, rainbow zebra crossings outside hospitals, that serve only to confuse guide dogs. There can’t be anyone of sound mind that now thinks more money is the answer for the NHS.

In a fascinating report this week, the Institute for fiscal studies has revealed that spending on the NHS has gone up, with more staffing, just as the service has got worse.

It’s a complex story, but by tackling needless waste, perhaps the nurses, could get their pay rise after all. Health bosses just need to spend less time composing leaflets, which deny the existence of women, describing breast feeding as chest feeding, and referring to females, as “people who menstruate”. What a bloody nerve. The NHS would save millions, if it stripped out woke nonsense. When people go to a hospital, they don't want a political lecture, they want treatment.