NHS to ration care access for extra funding

NHS bosses are to meet to discuss plans to ration and delay patients’ access to care, which could set them on a collision course with ministers over health funding.

NHS England’s board will debate what the service will and will not be able to afford to do next year after receiving less than half the amount called for in this year’s Budget.

The meeting comes amid tension between the organisation’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, and Theresa May and Philip Hammond. Stevens said treatment waiting lists could spiral and mental health and cancer care be hit unless the NHS received a £4 billion boost in the Budget, but the Chancellor awarded it just £1.6 billion extra.

NHS England hopes that the possibility of denying more patients drugs or surgery or making them wait longer for routine operations will force ministers to find more than the £1.6 billion to help avoid hospital and GP services from deteriorating badly.

But a coalition of 160 health and care charities has warned the health service that its plans to reduce the amount of care provided are undemocratic and ‘unfair’.

National Voices, in a written rejection of the proposals to Stevens, claims patients’ health will suffer if NHS chiefs press ahead with their plans. It says NHS England is acting beyond its powers by considering the plan.

In the letter, National Voices chief executive Jeremy Taylor tells Stevens that his members, which include Macmillan Cancer Support, Diabetes UK, Mind and the British Heart Foundation, are ‘concerned about these statements’ by Malcolm Grant and Bruce Keogh.

Keogh tweeted that ‘budget plugs some, but def not all, of NHS funding gap. Will force a debate about what the public can and can’t expect from the NHS. Worrying that longer waits seem likely/unavoidable’.

Senior NHS bosses have privately voiced concern at the wisdom of NHS England’s ‘confrontational’ tactics, though others believe Stevens is right to highlight the effects of the NHS’s budget rising at only about one per cent a year when demand for care is growing at four per cent.

The board will also ratify plans first unveiled earlier this year to stop prescribing 18 ‘low value’ drugs and treatments, including those to help treat acute pain, constipation, head lice and ringworm.

NHS England has also been looking at other drugs that it could stop paying for and also some forms of surgery that are not deemed clinically effective enough to permit the expense of performing.