David Cameron claims to have protected NHS spending. But this has failed to keep pace with growing demand, or even with inflation. Funding per head of population has actually fallen in real terms since 2010. Public funding of health as a proportion of GDP is on a downward curve. By 2008, the UK was in…
“Departments will continue to deliver overall spending plans set at the Spending Review 2015” That was how the Chancellor used the Autumn Statement to respond to the crisis in our NHS and social care services. The NHS, deep in funding crisis, wasn’t mentioned once – prompting a wave of anger and dismay from all corners.…
In a stark comment given in an interview to the Health Service Journal this week, Jim Mackey, head of NHS Improvement made clear the new policy priority for the NHS – austerity comes first. Ahead of a set of announcements for further belt tightening expected soon – what’s been termed the NHS financial reset –…
One of the strangest sights in this referendum has been the line of Brexit leaders queueing up to piously claim they’re really in this to help save the NHS. From early on, they’ve touted that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week to spend on the NHS. It doesn’t take long to debunk…
Some have been using the Greenpeace leaks of negotiating texts from the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP to claim Britain should leave the EU to escape damaging trade rules being imposed on us by shady Brussels negotiators. But disturbingly, what they actually show (adding to evidence we had from texts already publically available) is how…
There’s no doubt about it, the last 12 months have been a bumpy ride for our National Health Service. Will 2016 be any better? A year that started off with the government negotiating its way out of a bout of unprecedented industrial action involving NHS workers in England from nurses and midwives to paramedics and…
In its damning report last month, the King’s Fund health think tank criticised the government’s NHS reforms as “damaging and distracting” for introducing even more markets to the NHS, for making it too complex to govern properly and lacking effective leadership. The man behind these reforms, former health secretary Andrew Lansley, dismissed the report, saying that the…
One of the big ticket items coming out of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement was additional funding for the NHS. £2bn extra for 2015/16 and a new £300m a year fund for kick-starting GP innovation, derived from fines imposed on the banks’ shady foreign exchange dealings. There was plenty of scepticism around the Chancellor’s claims that…
Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt has proposed new regulations under section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act. The Act became law last March after a long and hard-fought campaign, and these regulations (SI 257) are secondary legislation. This means they’re assumed to simply deliver the detail of the original Act and…
The creation of the NHS on this day in 1948 was not just one of the greatest achievements in our history but also a massive stride forward in the provision and distribution of public healthcare. It was the first time anywhere in the world that completely free healthcare had been made available to all regardless…