IF THE British National Health Service seems to be on the edge of chaos,
that’s because it probably is. An analysis of surgical waiting lists has
revealed that the NHS behaves like complex chaotic system, following similar
natural laws to earthquakes and road traffic.
“An intriguing property of waiting lists is that they have resisted the
changes introduced into the NHS over the past few years,” says Marios
Papadopoulos, a neurosurgeon at Hurstwood Park Neurological Centre in
Sussex.
This is a characteristic of systems said to be “on the edge of chaos”. They
are too complex for us to understand…
