NHS England savings ‘not used wisely’
pharmafile | February 12, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | England, NHS, QIPP, Simon Stevens, health select
A group of influential MPs has raised serious concerns over what the £10 billion worth of NHS England savings made over the past two years has been spent on.
The NHS in England has been charged with making £20 billion in savings over a four-year period, with the money expected to be reinvested into front-line care and making services more productive.
So far more than £10 billion has been saved in the first two years with another £4 billion forecast for 2013-14.
The savings drive is set to go on until at least 2016, but some healthcare think-tanks are warning it may need to be extended until 2020. The current NHS budget stands at £106 billion per year.
But the Health Select Committee said in a report released this week that there was ‘little evidence’ these savings had been used wisely. It found that much of the funds had come from ‘straightforward’ measures such as pay freezes and cutting funding to hospitals.
These are also seen as ‘easy’ fixes to help save money in the short-term as they cut down on expenditure quickly.
This means that from now on making any large saving will become increasingly difficult and will require a greater reliance on innovation, efficiency and reduction of large costs – such as those from A&E departments and the drugs budget.
The Committee’s chairman Stephen Dorrell said: “We have not seen the transformation of care on the scale which is needed to meet demand and improve care quality.
“The NHS budget is static and the social care budget is falling. In these circumstances, the successful integration of high-quality health and care services represents a substantial and growing challenge.”
Health and social care
In a statement the Committee also said it ‘remains concerned’ that the pressures on available resources across the whole system – but in particular in social care – are now ‘much greater’ than they were a few years ago.
The result it says, is that successful integration of health and care services remains a ‘substantial and growing challenge’.
In a damning conclusion, it adds: “The Committee does not believe that either the pace or the scale of the change which is necessary is sufficiently understood or that sufficient steps are being taken to explain the need for change to either the health community or the wider public.”
The Committee has long argued for the integration of health and social care services and would also like to see more care within the community, and a focus away from the bricks and mortar of large – and expensive – hospital care.
The government has already acknowledged that more sustainable savings need to be made as the use of pay-freezes cannot be used for the long term.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, NHS England’s outgoing chief executive Sir David Nicholson said he wanted to see a ‘radical’ transformation with care being centralised in major hospitals and more integrated services provided in the community between GPs, nurses and social care.
“Our NHS does a superb job for millions of people, day in day out, but it cannot stand still – it needs to adapt to survive,” he added. Sir David will be replaced by Simon Stevens, a former executive at a US health insurer, in April.
Ben Adams
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