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Frame from How To Run A Hospital | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

How To Run A Hospital | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats

5 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this comedy video2 months2021–2025 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters cite it as the canonical joke about administrators multiplying regardless of the work, whenever threads turn to institutional or corporate bloat.

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.

“a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential no matter what” (HN, 2022)

2 recommendations · 3 citations · Comedy

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@YeBanKo Aug 2021 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Yes Minister dialog on administrator bloat
@maxwelldone Apr 2022 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Scene explaining why administrators are essential in the empty hospital

Citations, criticism and jokes

@waterhouse Jan 2021 Cites it
on HN thread 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."
Yes Minister episode about a hospital with staff and no patients
@frenchtoast8 Feb 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Macrodata Refinement
Read more
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 and Cold Harbor, I believe there are hints of other experiments being run. The dreams Irving B has during work seem unique to him, and it's uniquely affecting his outie as well. I also believe recent events in Season 2 with Dylan G could be the start of another experiment. ^1: [this video]
Yes Minister hospital with 500 employees as analogy for Severance
@jodrellblank Feb 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
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> "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 because it's complex. > All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes. That happens when a speeding ticket is a fixed $100. Norway can give speeding fines up to 10% of the driver's annual salary. A bad property tax disproportionately hurts the poor, not all property taxes. Your parent comment " Perhaps the most important question to ask is not who will gain - rather who stands to lose? " is the entire reason taxes get complicated - because every change is a change that someone gains and someone else loses. Any thing which is paid for by taxes has an argument over who should pay the tax, and how much of it; do parents pay tax for schools? Society benefits from more educated people, so does everyone pay? Is it an income tax because people who bene

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