19.10.12
Cost of Health and Social Care Act up £300m
Expected costs of the Health and Social Care Act have recently risen by £300m, health secretary Jeremy Hunt conceded in a written statement to the House of Commons. Estimates reveal a rise from an expected £1.2-1.3bn to £1.5-1.6bn.
The Health and Social Care Act, billed as the most extensive reorganisation of the NHS, will abolish NHS PCTs and SHAs, which are to be replaced by clinical commissioning groups.
Several unions have dismissed the reform as unnecessary and overly costly. Rachael Maskell, Unite’s head of health said: “The money spent on the reorganisation of the NHS for the benefit of private healthcare companies, whose priority is profits for shareholders at the expense of patient care, would have been better spent on frontline services for the sick and the ill.”
The news come as the Department of Health’s annual accounts show the NHS suffered a 2.55% employment dip between 2011 and 2012, where 28,000 jobs were lost in the space of a year.
Christina McAnea, Unison’s head of health, said: “£1.5bn to £1.6bn is an obscene amount of money to spend on a reorganisation and the Government should not be spending this money when the NHS is cutting back on patient care, on staff and on their pay conditions.”
Dr Mark Porter, chair of council at the British Medical Association (BMA), added: “The NHS has been tasked with saving £20bn by 2015, and that could go up. Achieving savings on this scale was always going to be a steep challenge, but it is being made even harder by the fact that time, energy and resources have been taken up by massive structural change.”
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “These are one-off costs. By investing in these changes we will be able to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and free up extra resources - £5.5bn during this Parliament and £1.5bn every year thereafter - for patient care.”
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