![]() It did this by handing responsibility for services to frontline staff – and has just been rewarded with a national award for patient care, as well as consistently improved services and waiting lists. It cut costs 6% a year, stripping out £11m in waste in just over two years incredibly, this included £3m procurement savings by ordering its own supplies rather than using NHS bulk purchasing. ![]() Take a look at Hinchingbrooke hospital in Cambridgeshire, the first privately run NHS hospital, which highlights continuing inefficiencies. It would raise about £4bn, less than one year's rise in costs. It is flirting with an "NHS tax" – perhaps a 1% rise in national insurance – to find fresh dividing lines with Tories and repeat Gordon Brown's trick from a decade ago. Labour paved the way for thousands of hernia and hip operations to be performed by private providers when in office now it uses this word to shut down debate. "Privatisation" is the dirtiest word in the health lexicon, used by ultra-conservative medical unions to defend their interests, even though up to one-third of NHS-funded staff work in profit-making businesses. This provoked predictable howls of outrage – yet fees for prescriptions and dental care already undermine the original NHS concept. Lord Warner, the former Labour health minister, recently sought to stir debate by proposing a £10 a month "membership" fee to stave off bankruptcy. Cancer survival rates remain comparatively poor, social care often grotesquely inadequate, and we spend more per head on healthcare than Iceland – yet have double its mortality rates for under-fives.īut woe betide anyone proposing change to this sacred body, whether to curb costs, ration treatment or offer innovative ideas for salvation. Yet this debate remains trapped in the past, with the institution still pathetically over-sanctified despite a series of horrific care scandals showing the damage this myopic stance can cause vulnerable patients. It is, as its new chief executive says, a defining moment for the NHS – it has to evolve fast or face a painful death. ![]() This is only for starters – after that, the figures become even more alarming. By next year's general election, two-thirds of hospital trusts fear they will be in the red by the following election, the Nuffield Trust predicts the NHS must spend almost £30bn more just to stand still. The NHS budget when launched in 1948 was about £9bn at today's value today, it is more than 12 times bigger and rising 4% a year in real terms as new treatments arrive, society ages and needs become more complex. The cold financial facts that confront the service are frightening.
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