THE Chair of the British Medical Association has warned of an increasing financial shortfall in NHS funding.
In his New Year’s message to doctors, Dr Mark Porter says that ‘efficiency savings’ are failing to keep pace with increased costs.
Dr Porter says: ‘The numbers overall are so bad that if the NHS were a country, it would barely have a credit rating at all.
‘The Nuffield Trust has estimated that if the NHS budget continues to keep pace with general inflation, there will be a shortfall of between £44 billion and £54 billion in England by 2021/22, unless there are productivity gains.’
Dr Porter writes that NHS staff have borne the brunt of the government’s attempts to find efficiency savings, with £5.8 billion delivered through reducing tariff payments or cutting staff pay through freezes, despite warnings that neither are a ‘sustainable form of efficiency gain’.
He adds: ‘It is beginning to be more widely recognised that more fundamental change is required.
‘Though, not necessarily the kind of change most of us would want.
‘A senior NHS leader warned recently at a policy gathering that efficiency savings would not be enough in the years ahead, and that the NHS would need to “take out capacity”. That translates as cutting services to patients.’
Despite this dire prediction, Dr Porter says that post-Health and Social Care Act, those working across the NHS in England are unsure as to who is in charge, with service change driven not by clinical need but by a ‘mishmash of political and financial imperatives, alienating the local communities that the services are meant to serve.’
Dr Porter adds doctors and other NHS staff must play a part in leading and shaping change and that, in the wake of the Mid-Staffordshire Inquiry, putting professionalism at the heart of the NHS has never been more important.
But in order to do this Dr Porter says those on the ground, the clinicians and the managers, must form a new relationship.
He says that doctors feel managers are there to enforce targets, find savings and many regard doctors as irritants in that process but that ‘we can no longer afford to have two tribes, because two tribes bring half the benefit to patients’.
