‘Tragedy for the NHS’ as bosses overspend by a shocking £900m
HEALTH bosses overspent by almost £900million in just nine months as they struggled to cope with winter pressures.
A shocking report yesterday by the regulator NHS Improvement said 135 of 238 trusts in England were failing to balance their books.
It warned that hospital chiefs were experiencing “one of the most challenging winters on record due to a huge increase in demand for urgent and emergency care”.
Trusts overspent by a total of £886million between April and December last year.
The regulator expects them to rein in their overspending by the end of the financial year to £873million.
Crisis
It would be a significant improvement on the record overspend of £2.45billion recorded last year.
Experts warned that they would be unable to balance the books until more money was invested in social care.
The rising number of patients “bed-blocking”, unable to go home because of the social care crisis, hits “patients, staff and budgets”, health bosses said.
Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation which represents health service organisations across England, said: “This is a tragedy. The NHS had made huge strides to treat and care for patients promptly but the latest figures show a further deterioration, and behind those figures lie real suffering for patients and exhausted staff.
“The danger now is that efforts to transform services that Government has rightly been championing are derailed because of all the effort that has to go into keeping the service going and trying to balance the books.
“The immediate priority is additional funding for social care. This is a system that is letting down more than one million elderly people who are not receiving the support they need.
“The result is over-stretched hospitals having to cope with too many admissions and too many patients unable to be discharged.”
Healthcare trade association NHS Providers’ chief executive Chris Hopson said: “The NHS’s underlying financial position is not sustainable.
“Trusts spent more than they planned and they lost income from cancelled operations. Both were needed to create the extra bed capacity to meet record emergency winter demand.
“This shows the danger of planning with no margin for unexpected extra demand. We can’t expect to run NHS finances on wafer-thin margins year after year and keep getting away with it.”
NHS England revealed earlier this month that the number of A&E patients seen within the target of four hours fell to a low of 86 per cent in December.
The number of people waiting more than 12 hours for a hospital bed doubled to more than 2,500 last year.
Numbers waiting more than two months to start cancer treatment after an urgent referral were also at a record high of 25,157.
Inefficiency
Anita Charlesworth, director of research and economics at the Health Foundation charity, said: “The NHS is locked in a vicious cycle of financial deficits, cost-cutting and inefficiency. Hospitals will find it very difficult to balance their books while social care remains under such intense pressure.
“The failure to invest in social care is a false economy, resulting in avoidable waste and inefficiency in the NHS.”
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “We know finances are challenging. But the hospital sector’s financial position has now improved by £1.3billion compared with this time last year, with 44 fewer trusts in deficit, helped by our £10billion investment.”