NHS chiefs call for more honesty about service cuts
pharmafile | October 10, 2011 | News story | | NHS, NHS reforms
The NHS Confederation has called on the government to be more open about cuts to the health service.
The government has committed to a real term increase in funding for the NHS, but this only works out at 0.1% more each year.
Many NHS leaders say this slight rise is undermined by the £20 billion in so-called efficiency savings that must be made by 2015.
Mike Farrar, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the public does not understand why these cuts are being made, and will resist services being cut as a result.
“It’s very difficult for NHS managers and clinicians to make those necessary changes,” Farrar said, “and the alternative to getting public support for that is that they make unplanned cuts which are frankly in some cases rather dangerous to care that people need.”
Anita Charlesworth, former director of public spending at the Treasury who is now with the health group the Nuffield Trust, says the real-term funding increase has become a real-term cut.
She told the BBC: “The government has increased the money available to local health authorities to buy care by 3 per cent.
“But when you take into account inflation and the fact of those health authorities being asked to hold back some money to prepare for contingencies and pay for one-off investments, the money that they’ve got available to spend with hospitals is 3% lower in real terms on average.”
The government has so far resisted calling the savings measures ‘cuts’, instead putting them under the QIPP banner – quality, innovation, productivity and prevention.
But some trust chief executives told the BBC that the government’s true agenda is simply about cutting services, rather than improving QIPP.
One trust chief executive told the BBC that ministers were not being straight with the public: “What people cannot tolerate is the lack of honesty about some of the tough choices that we’re having to make.
“Wrapping it up in a language of modernisation and patient choice is simply unacceptable.”
Ben Adams
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