Speaking to Public Finance at the HFMA annual conference, Paul Briddock said that following the additional £8bn announced for the NHS in the Spending Review, a spirit of optimism had returned to the NHS finance profession. It had given the health service a “fighting chance” after racking up a £1.6bn deficit after just six months.
But Briddock warned that repairing the service’s finances would still be a “tough ask”.
“There are some unanswered questions, like social care funding and how many [councils] are going to take up the 2% [council tax increase], so there are some question marks.”
Changes to social care funding have a knock-on effect on health, he observed.
“One of the biggest frustrations is the number of patients who are in hospital beds who are clinically fit for discharge but who are waiting for a nursing home placement or adaptations to their home. It’s not good for the patients – if they can go home, they want to go home – but it locks money into hospital beds that doesn’t need to be there,” he told PF.
Earlier this week, an alliance of health and social care providers called for urgent talks with the Treasury over what they warned was a funding crisis.
Briddock said a “perfect storm” of three factors had conspired to wreck NHS finances this year: the cumulative effect of annual 4% efficiency demands; the growing, ageing population; and the quality agenda following the Mid-Staffordshire inquiry. Shifts to seven-day working across the NHS also demanded more staff.
Problems were “systemic” rather than down to bad management, he argued.
“Some directors of finance have been director of finance for 15 years and they’ve delivered every year. They haven’t become bad directors of finance overnight.”
Failure to keep finances under control had taken a particular toll on the morale of the profession, he added. Morale was at a particular low in October when the HFMA carried out its biannual temperature check survey, published last month shortly before the Spending Review.
Yesterday, Jim Mackey, chief executive designate of NHS Improvement, told the HFMA conference that 2016/17 would be a “firebreak” year for the NHS and urged finance directors to use the breathing space offered by the Spending Review settlement to repair their balance sheets.
