Responding to the announcement of £800m in funding made available
to local NHS systems, Nuffield Trust senior policy analyst Sally
Gainsbury said:
“The funding announced today will only partially fill the
financial black hole that the NHS faced at the start of the year
and which has deepened as a result of industrial action.
“We estimate that around £450m of this funding was not already
available to NHS England before today, with the majority of any
“new” funding coming from other health budgets at the Department
of Health and Social Care. That will have knock-on effects on
local NHS organisations who were relying on DHSC funding for
infrastructure, IT projects and other national initiatives.
“With such little new money made available from the Treasury,
despite the asks of NHS leaders, the NHS has now been forced to
scale back ambitions to bring down record waiting lists to help
get patients seen quicker, such as paying staff overtime to run
extra clinics and outsourcing work to the independent sector.
This will ultimately mean some people will wait longer for their
operations and treatment than the NHS had hoped and planned at
the start of the financial year.
"To be very clear, this extra new money will not pay for
additional patient services, it will merely paper over some of
the hole in this year’s budget. As a result, resources will be
spread even more thinly and NHS organisations will have to focus
on emergency care and the most urgent of cases. While this
short-term sticking plaster will help health systems get closer
to balancing their books this year, that will come at the cost of
the NHS not being able to meet its own, and the public’s,
expectations of it. Once again we will see some ill-judged cuts
in capital and technology budgets which will further undermine
potential for productivity improvements in the future.”
