LONDON – Britain’s National Health Service is facing its worst financial crisis ever, according to a report. Hospitals are the most affected, with 132 out of the 138 trusts in England now in red. The total deficit is more than treble last year’s figure, as it is expected to reach £2.8 billion by the end of 2016.
The report by NSH Improvement described the current cash situation as “unsustainable”. The 240 hospital, mental health trusts and ambulance services combined recorded a deficit of £2.26 billion in the nine months to December 2015, compared to £664 million from the previous year.
Jim Mackey, Chief Executive Designate of NHS Improvement, said providers will be very disappointed by the report as it shows one important aspect of the many difficulties they are going through. “Despite this, providers are making progress on improving their finances whilst also providing more treatment, to more patients with more complex care needs than ever before”, Mackey pointed out.
However, he said the NSH will be forced to make improvements in order to tackle the operational challenges it is currently facing.
According to a report by Daily Mail, once of the main causes of the NHS’s financial crisis is that, due to staffing shortages, hospitals have been forced to spend too much on expensive agency nurses and doctors. Some trusts have paid up to £3,200 for a locum doctor and out £2,200 for an agency nurse per day.
But the major cause is represented by the rising and aging population, given that the number of individuals needing health care has steadily increased.
Heidi Alexander MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, blamed the Tories for the worst financial crisis in the history of the NSH, according to the report by the Daily Mail. Alexander added that UK’s health service is in “financial free fall” and that Tory Ministers have no control of the situation.
Patients will be inevitably affected by the crisis
Hospitals will most likely be under further pressure to cut staff in order to reduce their spending. They will also have to ration treatment or close wards. Patients will suffer, since they will face longer waits for operations and deteriorated care during wards if hospitals cut back on doctors and nurses.
Cancer patients are already facing longer waits for treatment, routine surgery and in A&E. Alexander said the Government needs to explain patients the consequences they will have to face because of the crisis, including certain services at risk of closure.
Source: Daily Mail
Of course, it’s “the Tories” fault. You know, those awful people who thought NHS was a slow motion disaster to begin with and were in total opposition to it.
Hmm. It looks like Margaret Thatcher was correct: Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money.
The British Conservative government are deliberately making the NHS (National Health Service), which is paid for out of general taxation and free at the point of delivery, fail to cause a crisis. They will then say there is no alternative but to hand it over to the private (for profit) sector. This will coincide with the culmination of the (secret) Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations which will enable the US health care companies to sue the UK government if they do not give them the opportunity to cherry pick the profitable parts of the NHS. This is not a conspiracy theory. Our doctors have been going on strike, the government is clamping down on the wages paid to healthcare professionals by medical staffing agencies, bursaries for student nurses are being taken away. They are creating the perfect storm. Big business do not like and will not tolerate socialised medicine. Big business run the government, not vice versa.
Hard to follow the thought process you have! 1st it is a Conservative scheme, then you state that there are no funds available to pay the staff to the point of strikes – which is it? Based on the article, it looks like there is a funding problem! The question is has the NHS budget been slashed by those nasty Conservatives? If not then it’s not working and get ready to pay more taxes!
Sorry you had a problem following my thought process. Let me simplify it for you.
What my comment boils down to is what Noam Chomsky said regarding privatization.
“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
I did not say there were no funds. The doctors did not go on strike because there were no funds. They went on strike because they were provoked.
It is a Conservative scheme but The Labour Party were also complicit.
There is a funding problem, but that is deliberate.
The question is not “has the NHS budget been slashed by those nasty Conservatives”. The question is “Do the Conservatives want to sell off the NHS to big business?”.
My contention is that they do.
The Royal Society of Medicine found that “The “surprising” findings [in a report by the RSM] show the NHS saving more lives for each pound spent as a proportion of national wealth than any other country apart from Ireland over 25 years. Among the 17 countries considered, the United States healthcare system was among the least efficient and effective.”
The NHS is financially viable.
Some people want to replace it with a profit making alternative, to the detriment of the British population.
strange they say that in the US you make a working system bad so you can socialize it. Comparatively speaking my care in the US far exceeded the care I received in the UK. While I will say it costs more here – the Government here has trouble running one system called the VA – I can’t imagine them trying to run a national system for everybody and have it turn out good.