Summer’s funding boost not enough to improve care

A new report has claimed that most of the £20.5 billion pledged for the NHS risks being swallowed up by the ageing population, pay rises, the rising cost of drugs and hospitals’ deficits.

The IPPR thinktank says that as little as £1.3 billion of the increase could remain to fund improvements in treatment, unless the service dramatically overhauls how and where it currently cares for patients.

Shared with the Guardian, the paper, which also contains the thoughts of Ruth Carnall, a former head of the NHS in London, and Hannah Farrar, a former executive at the NHS financial regulator Monitor, says that while the funding will be sufficient to meet increases in day-to-day demand and rising costs, it will not ‘fund significant improvements in care unless the NHS radically increases productivity’.

The authors suggest that providing the extra care caused by the growing number of over-75s and over-85s would cost £16.1 billion a year, while staff pay rises and pensions, the rising cost of drugs and other operating costs would take another £7 billion, while £1.56 billion would be needed to cover deficits built up by NHS providers of acute care.

Outlining three possible scenarios in how the funding could disappear, the worst-case scenario operates under the fact that NHS productivity rises by just 0.8 per cent a year, finding that only £1.3 billion of the total £20.5 billion would be available for improvements.

Harry Quilter-Pinner, a senior research fellow at the IPPR, said: “Theresa May’s NHS funding deal is generous but it will not go far. Once you’ve factored in an ageing population and the rising cost of staff and medicines, there is barely any money left in the coffers for the improvements in access and quality that the public really want.”