We can’t fix the NHS simply by throwing cash at it, says Hunt

JEREMY Hunt admitted yesterday that throwing money at the NHS could fail and that his own plans to rescue the health service had resulted in ballooning costs for the taxpayer.

The Health Secretary said different parties had ‘made the mistake too often’ of trying to solve problems with a big injection of cash, but without a proper strategy for how it should be spent.

He acknowledged that he too had made the same error, and that his efforts to deal with the fallout of the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal had resulted in costly agency nurses being used to plug gaps.

In frank comments, he said his lack of a proper workforce plan ended up with a ‘ballooning of the agency bill, costing the NHS a fortune’.

He told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday: ‘In the past we have made the mistake too often of saying the way you solve these problems is with a big injection of money. Health secretaries, different parties – and I hold my hand up to this myself as well – have thought that is the solution and they haven’t had a proper workforce plan.

‘The truth is you can put the money in but if you haven’t got the doctors and the nurses to employ with that money, you aren’t actually going to improve the care for patients.’

Mr Hunt made the comments as he announced plans to hire an extra 21,000 mental health care workers over the next three years. The recruitment drive is designed to transform struggling mental health services.

But the announcement comes at a time when the NHS is facing a severe workforce crisis.

Agency workers were used to correct historic under- staffing in the wake of the Mid Staffs scandal, in which failings includ- ing a lack of nurses contributed to the deaths of hundreds of patients at Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2009.

Spending on agency staff soared as the number of fulltime hospital nurses failed to keep pace with demand.

In 2015, the Government introduced caps on the amount that can be spent on agency staff, but figures have since shown that the limits have been regularly breached as hospitals struggle to fill rotas.

Mr Hunt said: ‘In the past, if you look at what happened in 2002 – Tony Blair put a lot more money into the NHS – but five years later, Derek Wanless, the architect of those plans [who wrote a major report on public health], said that 43 per cent of that extra money went into higher pay and prices because he didn’t have a workforce plan.

‘If you look at me, I had to deal with Mid Staffs and we wanted a big expansion in the number of hospital nurses.

‘We didn’t have a proper workforce plan and ended up with a ballooning of the agency bill, costing the NHS a fortune, which we are now tackling.’

He added there had to be strategic thinking and a proper plan in place to make a difference.

Hospitals across the country have been routinely left at the mercy of agencies because staffing cuts have left them so short of full-time nurses.

In 2015, the Royal College of Nursing said the NHS was on course to spend £980million hiring agency nurses to plug severe staffing gaps on wards.

The figure amounted to an average of £4.2million per hospital trust. The total was up from £485million in 2013/4 and £327million in 2012/3.

‘We didn’t have a proper plan’