An NHS health authority spent up to £10,000 on a survey of staff asking questions including whether or not Hitler was "cool".

The questionnaire also asked workers to compare the Nazi dictator to their own chief executive. Workers were asked to rate the "coolness" of other leaders including Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Winston Churchill and England manager Fabio Capello. The survey, entitled Making Leadership Cool, was rubber-stamped by NHS West Midlands Strategic Health Authority and circulated to all 3,300 workers at West Midlands Ambulance Service.

Health chiefs will use the results - which form part of a year-long study - to develop a Leadership Development Programme. Workers and taxpayers' condemned the seven-question survey, branding it "an appalling waste of money". Former worker Steve Jetley, 54, campaigned to save an emergency control centre in Shropshire after it was axed because of budget cuts.

He said: "It is an appalling waste of money. There are so many things that the NHS as a whole, and the ambulance service specifically, need to spend money on." But the West Midlands Ambulance Trust defended the survey, saying it "identified the key characteristics of good leadership". A spokesman said: "Staff were asked to look at different leadership styles and one of those was a dictatorial style. Adolf Hitler's style galvanised a country into terrible things but it did galvanise a country. Perhaps in hindsight a better example could have been used."

Like Mao or Pol Pot maybe?

It was his medical practice that gave Adolph the idea for the salute.

The original was here