How did she do it?
Source:Editor's Blog
Hooray! The NHS has got out of the red and may even make a surplus in 2006-7.
But that’s a hollow cheer for Patricia Hewitt, who I like and who has had a rough ride lately over the junior doctors’ application scheme, but fear that when these figures are analysed the news won’t look that good.
The NHS is a bit of a disaster to put it mildly. No-one in their right mind goes into hospital these days because they are likely to come out with illnesses they didn’t have before. Apart from that, the book balancing depended on training and public health budget cuts. Staff have been forced to accept staged pay increases, so the unions will say any surplus could have gone to fund pay rises while doctors will use the figure as proof that cost-cutting in the NHS has gone too far.
The shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "Cutting education and training and plundering public health budgets is not the way to manage the future of our NHS. No other business would be run on boom and bust and neither should the health service." He’s right there. If the NHS was run like a corporation of similar size it would be transformed within five years. As it is, the ‘service’ part of the NHS is vanishing as its consumption of funds goes up.
|