NHS told to "sit on" £1.8 billion surplus
24/12/2007
While thousands of patients went without services and life-saving drugs this year, the clampdown on spending within the NHS created a massive surplus of £1.8bn (2% of the total budget), yet now the government has told the NHS to 'sit on' the money - just weeks after health secretary Alan Johnson pledged it would be spent on improving services.
The NHS was ordered to balance its books after running up a £547m deficit in the financial year 2005/06 - so over the past two years it has been under extreme financial pressure, with many trusts cutting jobs and making other savings in order to break even. (Although those in management jobs got generous handouts).
The British Medical Association central consultants and specialists committee joint deputy chair Dr. Mark Porter said that NHS staff had been assured that the ‘pain’ of achieving surpluses would result in 'greater service investment'. And just last month Health Secretary Alan Johnson said: "Trusts will be able to use these resources, for example investing further in tackling healthcare-associated infections and delivering faster treatment for patients."
But now the government is not delivering on that promise - but instead plans to carry it forward to next year. And the operating framework also orders the NHS to deliver efficiency savings of 3% - which Dr Porter said would further erode spending power.
But if and when that surplus gets re-invested into the system - will it go into vital hands-on services, or be swallowed up by layers of bureaucracy? Only last November the Nursing Times reported that most nurses spend over half of their time tied up by NHS red tape, and a Lancashire woman named Nurse of the Year for her pioneering work in cancer resigned in anger at the time wasted on NHS bureaucracy.
Justine Whitaker said "layer upon layer" of red tape meant she sometimes went a whole day without seeing a patient: "Over the past 10 years the amount of form-filling I do each day has gone up enormously. Some days I don't see a patient and that is not good. I am a nurse and I want to nurse - that is my profession."
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley was critical of the surplus from the outset. He said: "The government's approach to the NHS has been one of boom and bust. They lost financial control and spent two years clawing back on NHS budgets.
Top-slicing PCTs and holding large surpluses at the centre is undermining health service planning across the country and creating inefficiencies."
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