17 June 2005
Patient care will suffer if health spending does not continue to increase at current levels beyond 2008, the NHS Confederation said this week.
At its annual conference in Birmingham, the managers' organisation cast doubt over whether government targets and improvement plans would be reached, even at the current record level of spending. It published a survey of chief executives, which found that 62% believed some targets would be missed, even though budgets will swell by about 9% a year up to 2008.
After that time, the comprehensive spending review is expected to limit NHS expenditure to the traditional annual increases of around 3% to 4%. But 84% of chief executives said this would harm patient care.
'This is not a story about a shortage of funding,' said confederation chief executive Gill Morgan. 'Rather, our ambitions are running ahead of what is possible. Between 1972 and 1998, Britain fell £220bn behind average European levels of health expenditure. We have now seen large increases in funding but cannot get over those levels of chronic under-investment overnight.
'NHS chief executives are worried that the pace of change cannot continue without further investment. The task for the coming year is to deliver more non-hospital care and we need to ensure there is sufficient funding for this.'
Morgan told the conference that the NHS had won the debate over whether the service was improving; now it must demonstrate it offered value for money or it would lose the battle to secure more funding after 2008.
NHS managers were concerned that some initiatives would not deliver the quality of care expected by patients. A third of those surveyed felt patients would not benefit from choice. And 85% called on the government to be more imaginative by offering choice in the form of treatment patients receive, as well as when and where they are treated.
Morgan asked the government for more time and support to implement reform.
'Give us time to think, adequate resources and well-crafted tools. Trust us and we can deliver,' she said.
PFjun2005
