Another £5 billion to add to the NHS deficit?
Christopher Hyland, 7 July 2014
The Times today (£) carries a letter from a group of very senior figures within the health sector arguing that unless taxes are increased – or very substantial cuts are made – the NHS will have to start charging patients at the point of use. The signatories include: Sir Richard Thompson, president of the Royal College of Physicians; Maureen Baker, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs; Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing; and Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society. Two of the signatories are non-executive directors of NHS England, which is responsible for the largest part (£97 billion) of the £110billion health budget.
They argue that the projected £30billion NHS deficit by 2020 is simply unfillable: “It would require productivity gains greater than what was achieved during the industrial revolution to bridge the gap, and the NHS has never been close to that,” said Sir John Oldham, a GP and former Department of Health official. “Unless action is taken, by 2020 maintaining the current level of service provision will require an additional £30 billion for just the NHS — which is as much as we spend each year on defence.”
This comes at the same time as a House of Commons Health Committee report which concludes that: ‘Cost pressures on the health and care system deriving from management of LTCs [long-term-conditions] and treatment of the increasing prevalence of comorbidities is likely to add £5 billion to the annual costs of the system between 2011 and 2018.’ That is, another £5billion on top of the anticipated £30billion NHS deficit by 2020. As if to add topical credence to the report, figures were released in the last week that show that there are now over a quarter of a million new cases of diabetes a year in the UK; and over 35% of the population is expected to have ‘pre-diabetes’ (that is, continuous damage to blood-sugar receptors and a sedentary lifestyle which, in combination, are highly likely to result in diabetes).
The Health Committee report argues that, to cope, the GP workforce must be expanded. Perfect timing, then, for the news today that 60 GP practices across the UK are facing imminent closure due to issues over funding and the ongoing GP recruitment crisis. This tends, as we have detailed before, to have a knock-on effect on the higher levels of primary care.
Furthermore, new figures show that the so-called A&E ‘summer crisis’ on waiting times is much worse than we thought: A&E departments have, in fact, missed their 95% waiting time target for the 50th week in a row. The House of Commons Library even went so far as to post a blog (now redacted) openly questioning the Prime Minister’s use of statistics. Entitled ‘Have A&E waiting times fallen?’, it strongly implied that David Cameron had used a “simplistic reading of the data” in a recent PMQs.
How to fund the NHS; what the NHS is, ultimately, for; and whether we can afford a National Health Service on its current scale – these are questions that are becoming increasing salient. And we can expect this to become more and more of an issue towards the next election – when, in 2015, a sharp £2billion drop in the NHS budget will take effect.