This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
NHS planning to delay or cancel spending
The King’s Fund’s latest quarterly monitoring report has revealed that the NHS is now planning to delay or cancel spending in half of local areas this year to meet financial targets.
How is the NHS performing? finds that 50 per cent of clinical commissioning group (CCG) finance leads say that achieving this year’s financial forecast is likely to depend on delaying or cancelling spending, while over 40 per cent say they plan to review or reduce the level of planned treatment they commission following the recent downgrading of the 18-week referral-to-treatment target.
NHS finances improved over the last quarter of 2016/17, but the report warns that ‘the underlying financial position remains gloomy’, with the 2017/18 financial year promising to be another difficult one for the NHS. 43 per cent of trust finance directors expect to overspend their budget and a similar 46 per cent expressed concern about meeting financial targets.
The report also highlighted an improvement in A&E performance, with 90 per cent of patients admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. However, only nine per cent of finance directors believe that the NHS will meet the commitment that 90 per cent of patients will spend no longer than four hours in A&E by September 2017.
Richard Murray, director of policy, said: “While the financial picture improved at the end of the last financial year, much of this is down to one-off actions such as selling land. The high levels of concern about the year ahead suggest that NHS providers are again likely to run up a significant deficit in 2017/18, a year when the sector is supposed to be in balance.
“With many CCGs planning to delay or cancel spending, local NHS leaders will be forced to make tough decisions about priorities and this is likely to have a direct impact on what care patients can access and how long they have to wait for it. This reinforces the underlying reality that demand for services is continuing to outstrip the rate at which the NHS budget is growing.”
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