The NHS has been given an extra £350m – the amount that was written in bold letters on the side of the infamous Leave campaign bus – to see it through any funding crisis it might face over the winter months.
But Chancellor Philip Hammond’s winter largesse in his Autumn Budget was a one-off payment rather than the £350m A WEEK that NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens had asked for after it had been pledged by Brexit campaigners.
The weekly amount promised by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and their fellow Brexiteers was the sort of money that Stevens said was needed to head off a winter crisis in the health care system. Instead, Hammond gave an extra total of £2.8m in one-off funding for the health service to cope with immediate pressures up to 2020, the bulk of which will be delivered in 2018 and 2019.
That will be broken down into the £350m for this year, which he said “will be available immediately to allow trusts to plan for this winter” £1.6b for 2018-19 and the remaining £850m in 2019-20.
That total rejected the unprecedented intervention from Stevens earlier this month when he said the NHS needed an extra £4bn in 2018-19. Hammond had dismissed Steven’s pleas with the claim that the people running public services always predict “Armageddon” before a Budget. “I don’t contest for one moment that the NHS is under pressure,” Hammond conceded, but his cash injection was barely 8% of what Stevens said was needed. NHS groups immediately said they would have to make “tough choices” about what can be delivered for patients with the money available.
Missed Opportunity
The Chancellor committed to funding a pay rise for NHS nurses, midwives and paramedics, but only if negotiations on wider pay reform were successfully concluded, he said. The nation’s nurses “deserve our deepest gratitude”, he said, adding that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was still negotiating changes to NHS pay scales. “If the Health Secretary’s talks bear fruit,” he said, “I will protect patient services by providing additional funding for such a settlement.”
NHS and staff groups called the Budget an “opportunity missed” with funding lower than asked for and emergency resources for winter delivered “very late”. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that if Hammond’s commitment did not result in a “meaningful pay rise” it would insult nurses who have had their salaries frozen or severely capped since 2010.
Janet Davies, chief executive of the RCN said the NHS had been running on the goodwill of its staff for too long. “With more talk of reform and productivity, Hammond runs the risk of insulting nurses who regularly stay at work unpaid after 12-hour shifts.“ she said. “Their goodwill will not last indefinitely.”
Ominous Warning
Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners complained that GPs were overlooked in the winter bailout. “It’s very disappointing that he has overlooked the increased pressures that GPs and our teams will be under and the role general practice plays in alleviating pressures on our colleagues in secondary care” she said. “The entire health service is struggling to cope with ever-increasing levels of demand, and as winter approaches, this will only be intensified.”
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chairman of the British Medical Association said the Budget was “a missed opportunity to provide vital support for NHS.”
“The NHS is facing the toughest period in its history and today’s Budget offers little respite. The extra funding promised may ease some short-term pressures but it falls far short of addressing the serious, long-term funding problems facing the NHS and doesn’t plug the funding black hole identified by the NHS’ own leaders,” he said.
NHS England chairman Sir Malcolm Grant said the funding was not enough and gave an ominous warning. “We can no longer avoid the difficult debate about what it is possible to deliver for patients with the money available,” he said. “The NHS England board will need to lead this discussion when we meet on November 30”.
by Bob Graham
The post NHS: Budget Completely Fails The Health Service appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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