UK health spending £900 less per person than Germany

Hospitals in England are spending £900 less per person than Germany, an expert has warned.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, was speaking at the NHS Providers annual conference when he said the NHS cannot continue in a ‘red zone’.

He said UK health spending needed to be about 13 per cent higher to match German or French levels.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the UK spent £2,777 per person on healthcare in 2014.

Hopson said the NHS is in the middle of the ‘longest and deepest’ financial squeeze in its history.

He pointed out that last year, the NHS in England had missed all four major targets, and said the NHS could no longer meet performance standards on current funding levels.

Although Hopson said that the NHS budget and staff numbers were growing, he warned that the health service was ‘slipping back’ on improvements made throughout the 2000s.

Hobson said: “The simple point is that if we want the best care, we have to pay for it. UK health spending would need to be around £24 billion, or 13 per cent higher, to match current German or French levels of health spending.

“If we wanted to spend as much per head of population as the French do, we’d need to be spending £300 a year more per person. To match the Germans, we’d need to be spending £900 a year more per person. Sobering figures which show that, in the end, as my dad used to say, you get what you pay for.

“We are now trying to run the NHS above its sustainable limits, well into the red zone … and [there is] a growing, tangible frustration that the hard-fought gains of the 2000s across a range of measures – for example, waiting times and single-sex wards – are starting to slip back at increasing pace.”