NHS’s funding black hole triples to £2.5bn
... but officials are accused of ‘cooking the books’
THE black hole in the NHS’s finances has trebled in a year – and now stands at £2.45billion.
Experts warned the situation was reaching ‘crisis point’ and that patient care is already suffering.
The record deficit comes as the health service faces soaring demand and has been partly caused by hospitals employing expensive private agency workers to tackle understaffing. This alone cost the NHS £3.64billion last year.
It is also being blamed on the social care crisis, with managers having to spend £145million on so-called ‘bedblockers’ – elderly patients well enough to leave hospital but who cannot be discharged because of a lack of care at home.
And the true figures may be even worse as there are accusations that officials are ‘cooking the books’ to meet financial targets imposed by the Treasury.
An analysis published yesterday by the regulator NHS Improvement showed the amount health trusts overspent by has soared from £0.85billion in 2014/15 to £2.45billion in 2015/16. The report also revealed the effect on care, with record numbers waiting too long in A&E, for ambulances and for vital cancer scans. Just 87 per cent of A&E patients were seen within four hours, well below the 95 per cent target.
Experts said health bosses were having to make ‘tough decisions’ about how to spend their increasingly squeezed budgets, including making cutbacks on staff and treatments.
Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS Improvement, said there was an urgent need to bring health trusts ‘back into balance’.
Anita Charlesworth, of The Health Foundation think tank, said the mood in the NHS ‘could not be bleaker’, adding: ‘The level of deficits in terms of scale and how many hospitals are in deficit is unprecedented. It puts organisations under stress, which makes them fragile and risky. There is pressure on recruitment, pressure on management, and that has an impact on services.’
Stephen Dalton, acting chief executive of NHS
‘Mood could not be bleaker’
Confederation, which represents health service providers, warned the NHS ‘could easily reach crisis point’.
One anonymous financial director accused the Department of Health of ‘cooking up accounting alchemy’ to make the figures look less bleak. He said officials were ‘shifting’ recorded costs around – such as moving money meant for maintaining hospital buildings into the budget for every-day running costs.
The NHS is facing huge demand from the soaring, ageing population. And following concerns that wards were desperately understaffed, hospitals hired expensive agency workers on rates of up to £3,000 a shift. The Government introduced caps on rates, but it is thought many hospitals are breaching them.
The Department of Health said: ‘We are committed to the NHS which is why we’re investing £10billion to fund its plan for the future.’ A spokesman added that their ‘clampdown on expensive agency staff is starting to have an impact’.