HEALTH MATTERS

Jerry Hawker, chief officer of NHS Eastern Cheshire CCG REGULAR readers of this column will know there’s a growing gap between the funding we get from NHS England and the money we need to carry on as we are.

You may find that hard to believe when I tell you that we have £280.5m to spend on healthcare in 2017-18. Although it’s a lot of money, it’s less than the cost of one hospital admission for each of the 204,000 people we serve. What’s more,it’s £8m less than we need according to government calculations.

To try to reduce our debt, we’re working hard this year to save £17.9m, or nearly four per cent of turnover. But, even if we manage it, we’ll still end the year with a debt of £13.4m agreed with NHS England.

Yet our end-of-year deficit is more likely to be £23.1m. That’s because there’s a gap of nearly £7m that we will not be able to bridge unless we make major changes to the way services are delivered.

Such changes would almost certainly require public consultation and approval in principle by NHS England. Discussions have been under way for some time and it’s likely that an announcement will be made early next year.

In the meantime, we have made important progress with improving efficiency. For example, our 23 GP practices have reduced hospital referrals by enhancing services available in primary care.

We have stopped funding the prescribing of over-the-counter medicines for common, self-limiting ailments. We have also restricted access to certain procedures of lower clinical priority including revised thresholds for treatments considered cosmetic and for sterility and fertility treatments including reducing funding of IVF from three cycles to one – in line with most other CCGs.

Further plans for 2017-18 include:

• Following a process called NHS RightCare, which is helping us find the treatment approaches offering the greatest opportunity for improved clinical effectiveness and value for money