NHS under fire for productivity failure
pharmafile | June 19, 2009 | News story | |Â Â NHS, healthcareÂ
The NHS is under fire from MPs for failing to improve productivity despite a pay bill which has risen 5.2% a year on average since 2004-05.
Agenda for Change, the NHS's much-vaunted pay modernisation scheme, was "supposed to generate better and more flexible working by staff, to the benefit of patients", the Committee of Public Accounts said.
The scheme covers 1.1 million NHS staff in England – excluding doctors, dentists and senior managers, who have a separate pay programme – and was put in place between December 2004 and December 2006.
It introduced a job evaluation scheme and harmonised employment terms within the NHS.
But Committee chairman Edward Leigh MP complained that: "The promised new and more effective ways in which staff were going to work have yet to emerge.
"There is also no evidence of the increased productivity and other savings in the NHS that were going to be achieved," he added.
In fact the Committee's report – using figures from the Office of National Statistics – suggested productivity actually fell by 2.5% a year on average between 2001 and 2005.
This does not sit well with the Department of Health's prediction to the Treasury of improvements in productivity of 1.1%-1.5% per year, the report said.
Agenda for Change was meant to lead to significant savings in its first five years. But the Department of Health did not require Trusts to measure productivity improvements or other benefits.
"It is not known whether the Agenda for Change programme has generated the predicted £1.3 billion savings," said Leigh.
"That makes it all the more incumbent on the Department to explain to us how the programme is going to support the £15 billion of efficiency improvements in the NHS planned for the next three years."
Although there has been "substantial" growth in the amount of healthcare provided, this was overtaken by the even faster growth in NHS staffing and resources, he said.
A key plank of the Agenda for Change, the Knowledge and Skills Framework, was aimed at improving staff performance – but it has been relaunched twice.
And as of autumn last year, almost half of staff involved had not been given the annual knowledge and skills review they were supposed to, the Committee said.
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