The health service must stop wasting cash, says its boss
HOSPITALS have tolerated financial waste for far too long, the head of the health service warned last night.
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said they had been too reliant on agency workers, failed to explore better purchasing deals and refused to share resources.
The NHS needs to save £22billion by the end of the decade just to ensure it can cope with a growing and ageing population.
The Government has agreed to provide more funding – rising to an extra £8billion a year by 2020 – but Mr Stevens said he did not expect the first of that money to arrive until late next year.
Speaking at the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool, he said that although the funding increase was lower than the health service had come to expect in times of affluence, it was more than had been pledged to the rest of the public sector.
And despite the tight funding situation, he said there was potential ‘for money still to be left on the table’.
He said different parts of the NHS and social care sector should start to share resources, adding: ‘We have failed to use our collective purchasing power.’
Mr Stevens admitted that the wrong investment decisions had sometimes been made at senior levels – for example failing to train enough GPs, which had left a looming shortfall.
‘We have sometimes been pennywise and pound foolish – that is nowhere more evident than our relative underinvestment in general practice,’ he said.
The use of agency staff cost the NHS £3.3billion last year. Mr Stevens told the conference that, given staff shortages, this figure was to be expected, but added: ‘We know there is an impact on quality of care for patients when there is a constant succession of temporary staff who do not know their way around the hospitals.’
He said health trusts should take a ‘muscular approach’ to drive down costs – including spending on management consultants.
Peter Carter, head of the Royal College of Nursing, said it was right to clamp down on excessive spending.
But he added: ‘This will only work alongside longer term solutions, like converting agency staff to permanent staff.’
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who will address the conference today, is expected to repeat his call for the NHS to stop complaining about funding cuts.
Meanwhile, huge swathes of the health service were yesterday placed in special measures after decades of failure.
In an unprecedented intervention, Mr Stevens announced that the whole of Essex, most of Devon, and half of Cumbria would be placed under national supervision.
He said that the three regions had been in ‘ systematic imbalance for years, if not decades’.
National troubleshooters will be sent in to tackle hospitals which have failed to stick to budgets and A&E departments that persistently breach waiting times.
Previously, individual trusts had been placed in special measures – but Mr Stevens said that a wider view needed to be taken to get to the root of the problems.