Funding makes seven-day NHS ‘impossible’

A seven-day NHS will be ’impossible’ to attain with the current levels of funding and staffing, NHS Providers chief executive has said.

Discussing the topic on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme, NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson argued that there should be a debate about which services to sacrifice ‘rather than pretend the gap doesn't exist’, maintaining that, at some point, ‘something has to give’.

A seven-day NHS, part of the Conservative Party's 2015 manifesto, has been a keen policy of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt since the Department of Health stated that there was a ‘clear link between poorer outcomes for patients and uneven service provision at the weekend’.

However, NHS Providers, who represents hospitals in England, argues that 80 per cent of England's acute hospitals are in financial deficit, compared with five per cent three years ago. Furthermore, missed A&E waiting time targets have risen from 10 per cent to 90 per cent, which Hopson maintains there is ‘clearly a system-level problem - not a problem of poor management’.

Hopson told the BBC that he wanted to see the seven-day NHS idea abandoned, and priority placed on putting more money into the NHS through general taxation instead.