NHS has more money and staff than ever before but has made poor use of it, says report

LONDON Oct 27: The NHS has more money and staff than ever before but has made poor use of it to improve access for patients when they are in urgent need, lawmakers on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in their report. This was stated in the PAC report conclusions and recommendations.

The NHS is spending more money year-on-year in real terms, with its £152 billion budget in 2022-23 being £28 billion more than its budget in 2016-17. It also currently has record numbers of staff, including double the number of doctors in emergency departments compared with 2009. Despite this, the performance of urgent and emergency care services has been deteriorating for many years and while NHS productivity had been improving before the COVID-19 pandemic, it subsequently fell 23% over the two years 2019-20 and 2020-21.

NHS England’s projection of future staff requirements in its workforce plan assumes staff productivity will increase by 1.5% to 2% annually but lacks meaningful detail on how this will be achieved.

The NHS currently does not have effective metrics to manage patient flows between different parts of the system, and investment in technology and infrastructure improvements will be critical to improving productivity. However, the Department does not appear to have budgeted for any such investment and NHS England’s existing plans lack ambition given the scale of the issue at hand.

The study found wide regional variations in ambulance response times, with not enough done to tackle delayed discharges of patients from hospitals, reports Xinhua news agency.

An uncosted long-term NHS workforce plan, the committee warned, could lead to unsustainable financial pressures for the NHS, the UK’s biggest employer with a workforce of almost 1.3 million doctors, nurses and other staff.

How quickly an ambulance arrives to take patients to hospitals depends too much on where in the country they live, the report said.

Average ambulance response times for the most serious incidents varied from nearly seven minutes in London to over 10 minutes in South-West England.

Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: “Anyone who has had recent contact with the NHS knows it is in crisis. Patients suffering long waits and hard-pressed staff working in a system which is not delivering deserve better.

“The government and the health system need to be alert to the serious doubts our report lays out around the workforce crisis, both the approach to tackling it now and the additional costs funding it in the future.”