Stevens got his sums badly wrong. Flickr/NHS Confederation. Some rights reserved.
Last week's call from NHS regulator Monitor for NHS Trusts to fill only essential vacancies is very worrying, even if, as later clarified, the advice is directed at non-clinical staff as this has a knock-on effect on the whole workforce. Sadly this news comes as no surprise to me. The National Health Action Party has consistently been warning that the NHS is on a financial cliff edge and that underfunding threatens to push it over. The £8bn that NHS CEO Simon Stevens asked for, and George Osborne allocated in the summer budget, is clearly inadequate as it is predicated on £22 billion of efficiency savings that even senior figures at NHS England, as well as leading health think tanks, now agree are unfeasible. The NHA Party gave fourteen separate warnings that Mr Stevens' plans were unworkable.
What is particularly galling is that Jeremy Hunt is now able to bat away calls for more funding by saying he has given Mr Stevens everything he has asked for. Effectively, 'stop whingeing and get on with it'. As if that's not bad enough, Mr Hunt is at the same time demanding the NHS squeezes a fully operating seven day service out of an already inadequate budget.
