It’s crazy for NHS to spend £1,579 on a moisturiser
WHO knows how much your average Hollywood starlet pays for her moisturiser but I bet it isn’t as much as £1,579 – the price that the NHS recently paid for a single tub of cream prescribed for a patient with a skin problem. I don’t suppose, either, that even the most vain and wealthy of actresses would pay £650 for a small bottle of coconut oil.
These are just some of the outrageous prices which the NHS has been revealed to have shelled out for simple preparations of creams and ointments. These are products with special formulations that are not quite available in your chemist but which nevertheless cost only pennies to make.
In one case the NHS paid £1,323 for a bottle of ointment. To give an idea of what the product was really worth, a similar bottle was later bought for just £1.90. In all the NHS is spending £50million on socalled “special” medicines, made to a one-off formulation.
It’s not the first time that the NHS has been caught paying way over the odds for supplies. Two years ago an investigation found that drugs companies were exploiting a loophole in regulations that are supposed to limit the prices which they can charge for propriety medicines. The firms were bypassing the rules by selling the medicines under generic names instead.
THIS led to the price of a packet of hydrocortisone tablets rising from 70p to an astonishing £85. A packet of antidepressant tablets had been jacked up from £5.71 to £154. This sharp practice was costing the NHS £262million a year.
We are forever being told that the NHS is cash-strapped. Labour MPs accuse a “callous” Tory government of depriving the health service of desperately needed cash. It isn’t true: in spite of the vast deficit left behind by Gordon Brown the Government has still managed to increase the NHS budget by one per cent a year in real terms since 2010.
But there is no point in endlessly pouring money into the NHS if it is going to be wasted through poor negotiations with suppliers – or through laziness in not bothering to shop around. Time and again we have seen the NHS overpay for goods and services, depriving itself of funds that could have been spent on extra treatments. The practice of building hospitals through the Private Finance Initiative has compelled taxpayers to pay for new buildings on long, inflexible contracts for decades into the future.
The contracts have proved to be an expensive way of financing new hospitals but many of the contracts have come with a sting where NHS trusts are forced to pay absurd sums if they want to make any changes or have anything supplied which was not specified in the original contract.
North Cumbria University Hospital Trust was forced to pay £75 for a single air freshener and £466 to instal a single light socket. County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust had to pay £525 just to have the contractors move three beds. Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Trust ended up paying £676 to have three “fire assembly point” notices installed. Hull and East Yorkshire District Hospitals Trust paid an astonishing £8,450 to have a dishwasher supplied and installed. The list goes on.
How can the NHS get itself into a position where it can pay so much for simple things? Why don’t the chief executives of these trusts invest in a copy of Yellow Pages and phone around for an odd job man? Or even roll their sleeves up and do the jobs themselves.
Another big black cloud over the NHS budget is the cost of litigation. Between 2008 and 2015 the cost of settling negligence claims rose from £583million to £1.4billion. Of course if someone suffers a serious injury as a result of failed care in an NHS surgery or hospital they should be paid compensation. But a huge amount of the NHS litigation bill seems to disappear into lawyers’ pockets.
In one case a patient who had a kidney tumour misdiagnosed was paid £5,000 in compensation – yet the lawyers put in a bill for £121,800. In 2004/05 legal fees accounted for 32 per cent of the NHS litigation bill yet by 2015/16 that had mushroomed to 54 per cent.
The Government has imposed salary caps on nurses for years, leading to falls in their real wages. Why can’t it pass legislation to cap the fees which can be charged by lawyers involved in these cases?
IN spite of its faults the NHS is a hugely valued national institution which very few people would want to dismantle. Thanks to its treasured status the Government saved it from the painful cuts which other public services had to suffer when Labour left office in 2010 with a £160billion-a-year public spending deficit.
But the NHS should not be exempted from the need to spend its money wisely. For too many years governments have been throwing money at the NHS and boasting about it as if spending a certain number of billions of pounds was an achievement in itself.
Look how much extra we’ve spent on healthcare, they like to say – as if how it has been spent doesn’t matter a jot. But of course it does. Every time the NHS overpays for a tub of moisturiser or a packet of tablets, that is money which has been taken out of treating patients.
Clearly there are some very skilled medical staff working in the NHS. It is just a shame that some of the people procuring its supplies seem to be so lousy at basic shopping skills.
‘Outrageous amounts spent on supplies’