Will NHS funding savings result in substandard care?
Wednesday 25th August 2010
Before the last election in the UK, stark warnings could be heard from all corners of the government, warning that in the wake of the economic downturn, serious spending cuts would have to be made in order to help rectify gaping holes in the country's balance sheet.
With the new coalition government now in place, spending cuts across all fields are being rolled out and one of the most heavily impacted sectors is health. While it will not see any dents made in its government allocated budget, over the next few years, the NHS is expected to cut its spending by billions of pounds, which has left a bad taste in the mouth of many NHS workers and representatives and left them asking how these cuts impact those in need of care.
It has long been the case that many in the NHS feel both overworked and underpaid, but with health authorities being asked to reduce expenditure by as much as £20 billion over the next few years, the situation could get worse and it may be the patients who suffer the most.
Spending reductions could come in a number of different forms - staff redundancies, cutbacks on equipment buying, delays in renovations to ageing hospitals, but wherever they are seen, patients may be affected.
Dave Prentis, general secretary of the Unison union, urged the government to cut back on spending within the health sector in different ways. Speaking to the Health Service Journal, he explained his own ideas for reducing the cash which is spent on the country's hospitals.
He said that less privatisation of care and more progressive taxation would help to free up cash, which could then be used to bolster healthcare funding, and admitted he will "struggle" to work alongside the new coalition government if it takes the same spending line with health as the previous one.
In a white paper published last month, both the British Medical Journal and The Lancet expressed concern at the proposed spending slashes with much of the anxiety stemming from other plans, announced by Andrew Lansley, to reorganise some aspects of the NHS budget making at a cost of some £3 billion.
"In The Lancet, an unsigned editorial demands that Mr Lansley "tell the truth about NHS cuts" which it claims are happening to front-line services in contravention of the Conservatives' pledge to protect them," said the Independent.
Uneasiness over proposed spending reductions and other NHS ideas has come from the British Medical Association (BMA) who called the cuts "haphazard" and warned of their impact on the quality of care which doctors and nurses can give to patients.
Speaking at the BMA's annual conference, chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum said that the group has seen evidence which suggests jobs could be lost and patients could find their access to certain healthcare services restricted as a direct consequence of the cuts.
Reductions are being put in place too early and without the necessary consultation of those who actually work in the NHS, he warned, saying that "cuts are already being planned or becoming a reality and these will have an impact on doctors' ability to care for patients".
Figures from a BMA survey of healthcare professionals suggested that one in four doctors said their employer is looking at making people redundant and more than 60 per cent are planning to freeze recruitment.
This could have a knock on effect on those who already work in the NHS, the group warned, as doctors may be forced to pick up extra jobs, such as admin, which are usually taken care of by other people - giving them much less time to care for patients.
At a recent question and answer session in Bristol attended by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the worries of many working in the NHS were made clear in a number of sharp exchanges between Clegg and voters.
Nurse and former midwife Kim Farmer told the leader she has lost her job over the government demands for cutbacks on spending. She said she is "really worried" about how the reductions will impact on patient care and nurse Natasha Cook agreed.
Miss Cook told Mr Clegg that at her hospital, there are some wards which are so understaffed it is "dangerous".
"Patients are not getting the care that they need. Quite often we hand over from shift and patients have not received any care that shift, because there are not enough of us on the ward to see every patient," she warned, reported the Independent.
Public Service highlighted the issues with NHS cuts in Scotland and said that north of the border; the health service is already struggling with its "tightest NHS financial settlement since devolution".
The source said that there is no way in which the cuts and sufficient patient care can be married together successfully - in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde some 1,250 jobs are expected to be cut to save cash and over half of them will be nurses, it said, stating "you cannot get rid of so many frontline staff without having an impact on patient care".
But it seems to not just be medical care which is being impacted, but the ability to keep up patient moral and wellbeing, with Public Service claiming that in some hospitals, money is so tight that tea and coffee services for inpatients are being scrapped.
Written by Matthew Horton
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