04.05.16
Government is in ‘denial’ about NHS financial crisis – BMA
Doctors’ leaders have warned the NHS is “crippled” by government denial about its funding crisis at an emergency meeting.
Yesterday the British Medical Association (BMA) called a special representatives’ meeting, last held in 2011, to discuss NHS funding.
Dr Mark Porter, chair of the BMA, said in his speech to the meeting that the government had come up with less than a third of the £30bn the NHS needed and were pressuring doctors to make impossible efficiency savings.
“We must believe that we can make British medicine better and our health service better. It needs our hope as much as it needs our effort. It has never needed our hope more than now,” he said.
“It is a health service with a revenue larger than the GDP of many countries but which would struggle to get a credit rating. Which suffers from debt, but is crippled by denial.
“The chancellor speaks of a ‘fully-funded’ NHS but has come up with less than a third of the extra £30 billion in England alone that he admits it needs.
“Stop and reflect on that for a moment. A government claiming to increase resources while the mathematically competent can see that it’s all cuts and efficiencies.
“His claims are fantasy, but so too are his solutions. He says we just need to be more efficient. So much more efficient that £22bn worth of work that we do apparently won’t exist, or won’t cost anything, in four years’ time.
“That sounds like a lot of patients who will no longer need treating. Is the chancellor hoping they’ll all move to Australia with the junior doctors?”
‘Witch trial’ junior doctors’ contract
Although Dr Porter said that the meeting was “not about” the BMA’s ongoing industrial dispute over the government’s planned imposition of a new junior doctors’ contract, he repeated calls for the government to restart negotiations, saying the contract had “all the legal foundation of a witch trial”.
Dr Porter also said that the Carter Review, which offered the more “sophisticated” solution to healthcare funding of transferring more medically fit patients from hospitals, had been scuppered by a lack of funding for social care which meant that patients had nowhere else to go.
The most recent figures show delayed care transfers have increased by 6% in the past year.
However, he said that the new GP Forward View was a sign that GPs’ working lives could become “more bearable”.
Dr Porter concluded by warning that the UK could be the first country in the world to lose its health service “through sheer unmitigated carelessness”, adding: “We must not let this happen. Our patients would never forgive us if we did. We would never forgive ourselves.”
He called for a commitment from the government to focus on integration “not piecemeal privatisation” and to match the “extraordinary commitment” of NHS staff.
NHE contacted the Department of Health for a statement but they did not reply at the time of publication.
(Image c. Philip Toscano from PA Wire and Press Association Images)