By Nick Mann | 5 December 2011
Reducing NHS spending by up to £20bn by 2014 is a ‘huge’ challenge but will help to ‘breed innovation’ in the health service, according to the president of the Healthcare Financial Management Association.
Sue Jacques told Public Finance that both clinicians and managers were committed to meeting the savings goal, which she said had ‘focused minds’ on the need to make efficiencies at the same time as improving the quality of service being offered.
‘We all feel a joint obligation to deal with it – the best of British comes out and that’s where we breed innovation,’ she said.
Jacques said that there was an acceptance across the NHS that changes had to be made due to both the financial climate and the ageing population.
‘Most people that work in health understand the environment we’re in,’ she said. ‘We’re employing very intelligent individuals. They can understand that with an ageing population you can’t just stand still and you need to be operating much more efficiently.’
In particular, Jacques said, devolving the running of NHS services to clinical areas would have a ‘critical’ role to play by encouraging clinicians and finance managers to work in partnership. Known as ‘service line management’, this involves specialist clinical areas being dealt with as individual units, which have their own targets and finance and resource management.
‘By developing service line management, we started having discussions with clinicians about where we can make efficiencies but at the same time improve the level of service we deliver,’ she explained.
Chris Calkin, national media officer at the HFMA, added: ‘I think quality is the overall objective, then finding ways we can deliver better quality services at a lower cost. Consultants get that.’
