How did doctors, nurses, porters and cleaners etc know what they were supposed to do in the days before hospitals had corporate identities, brand images, logos and mission statements? It all seems so long ago now that it is like trying to recapture what life was like before television and Subscriber Trunk Dialling.
I do remember, however, the long and sometimes acrimonious meetings to discuss the development of hospital mission statements. All over the country, grown (and highly trained) men and women sat around for hours in hospital boardrooms, thinking up snappy little slogans such as "Caring for Margate" or "Abolishing death in Durham", although "Losing Mrs Smith's notes" or "Finding new ways to make food inedible" would perhaps have been more truthful and credible. A three-hour meeting to discuss a mission statement is an NHS bureaucrat's idea of real work, by the way.
The logos for the new hospital trusts created by former health secretary Kenneth Clarke's reforms had to be designed by professionals, however, at a cost of between £2,000 and £15,000 each. Little phoenixes started to rise from the flames at the top or bottom of hospital notepaper, as did birds of various kinds (though never, of course, vultures). Flowers, torches, even horses, adorned the pages of medical letters; and one hospital trust was so enthusiastic about its logo that henceforth it omitted to put its name and address on its notepaper, so that for a time recipients of its letters had no idea where they came from.
But now all corporate-identifying, brand-imaging logos are to go, swept into the waste-paper basket of history, as it were, and all our correspondence is to be subsumed under one big NHS logo, a blue lozenge bearing the letters NHS in white, developed and implemented at a cost of only £225,000 (the whole of Pasteur's researches probably cost less). The spokesman for the NHS Confederation, however, says that the new logo will save the NHS £340,000.
Of course, saving money in the NHS has a special, technical meaning. It usually means wasting less money than might have been wasted some other way. To save money in the NHS has approxi mately the same meaning as saving money at the January sales when you buy something you don't need and probably can't use: a fish tank oxygenator, for example, at an irresistibly knock-down price, when you don't have a fish tank in the first place. You think of the money you've saved, not the money you've spent.
What does the spokesman mean, then, when he says the new universal logo will save the NHS money? Well, 500 new organisations are formed within the NHS each year, he says, and if each of them developed a new logo of their own, the expense would clearly be considerable. Now they will all just use the blue NHS lozenge. It will not only save a lot of money, but - presumably - be a tremendous weight off administrators' minds, as they shed the onerous burden of responsibility for commissioning the design of new logos.
But what of the brand image of hospitals if all logos (save one) are to go? There are cynics among us who believe that hospitals don't need brand images at all: because if you live in Slagshire, it is to the Slagshire Royal Infirmary you must go when you're ill, there being no other hospital for miles around. The Slagshire Royal Infirmary, therefore, does not have to tout for business. It already has market share: approximately 100%.
Opponents of the blue lozenge concept of the NHS think, however, that it is symptomatic of the government's desire to control and regulate everything. Henceforth, we shall all sing the same song, whether we like it or not. The blue lozenge is yet a further threat to our independence.
Personally, I don't think the new blue lozenge matters at all, and I shall certainly not be manning the barricades to defend my hospital's logo to the death. What truly appals me is the comment of one senior bureaucrat: "A single brand logo is a terrific idea."
For if that is what constitutes our rulers' idea of a terrific idea, God help us all.
• Theodore Dalrymple is a hospital doctor
