How To Run A Hospital | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as the canonical joke about administrators multiplying regardless of the work, whenever threads turn to institutional or corporate bloat.
What it is
A short Yes Minister clip in which Sir Humphrey explains why a hospital with no patients still needs a large administrative staff. It is a satirical look at bureaucratic bloat in the public sector.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends YeBanKo · 2021-08 · on “New York Public Library’s Picture Collection Will Be Archived”
“Once the Picture Collection is relocated, its space in Room 100 will house administrators who were hired for educational outreach.” - inflation of administrative apparatus is a scourge of modern society. It is partially responsible for growing costs of education and healthcare. One of my favorite dialogs in Yes, minister! [this video]
Recommends maxwelldone · 2022-04 · on “Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls”
This reminds me of a great scene[1] from the British show "Yes, Minister". It's from an episode called The Compassionate Society where a minister for Department of Administrative Affairs learns about a newly built hospital which has some 500 employees but no doctors & patients. The scene I linked is a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential no matter what. [1] [this video] Full episode: [LINK]
Cites waterhouse · 2021-01 · on “University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty”
"Yes, Minister" has an episode about a hospital with 500 employees and no patients: [this video] The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg."
Cites frenchtoast8 · 2025-02 · on “Macrodata Refinement”
My theory is that all the severed employees are doing various maintenance tasks to keep the floor functioning. Like the hospital in Yes, Minister that is closed to the public but has 500 employees, all of them overworked.[1] Take O&D for instance, their full time job appears to be to just create art and handbooks used on the severed floor. Perhaps all the departments are like that. MDR could be doing some sort of ongoing maintenance for the severed system itself, like emotion or memory control of the employees on the floor. I believe the "point" of the severed floor is not the actual work that's being done, but the act of keeping them occupied while they are experimented on. Besides Mark S a
Cites jodrellblank · 2025-02 · on “Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'”
> "I do. Property in one thing that I think should be equally divided among individuals, with individuals being able to use/rent in whatever manner they please within certain confines (lots of assumptions here and lots of if and buts, but it's huge discussion)." That's interesting, and rather goes up against the free markety ideas that the people with the most valuable use for land/property should be able to buy as much of it as they want from people with less valuable uses (who can sell it at market rates). I am interested and do wonder how that might work, and if it would work. Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad becau