The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has published a new report this morning that is damning of Tory NHS management. Remember that this is a cross-party committee that only publishes with unanimous support from its members, and it has said:
The Department has overseen years of decline in the NHS's cancer and elective care waiting time performance and, even before the pandemic, did not increase capacity sufficiently to meet growing demand. The NHS has not met the 18-week maximum waiting time standard for elective care since February 2016 nor, in totality, the eight key standards for cancer care since 2014. As demand for services rose faster than supply in the years before the pandemic, performance against waiting times standards declined but the Department neither adjusted these standards to realistic levels nor sought to hold NHSE&I to account adequately.
This is not, then, a Covid issue. This is a long term systemic issue of Tory mismanagement of the NHS. That is the core message that runs through all that the Committee has to say.
Worse, they note that the mismanagement continues:
At our evidence session the Department and NHSE&I appeared unwilling to make measurable commitments about what new funding for elective recovery would achieve in terms of additional NHS capacity and reduced patient waiting times. NHSE&I will receive an additional £8 billion for elective care recovery and £5.9 billion for capital between 2022–23 and 202425. Government expects that this additional funding will enable elective care activity to be 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels. However, the Department and NHSE&I have not set out in meaningful detail what the money will be spent on.
Instead what we got from Sajid Javid was his recent speech on his vision for the NHS. This was our Ayn Rand in its tone. As I noted:
If Javid wanted to set up the NHS to fail this is the speech he would have delivered.
As Health Policy Insight also noted (behind a paywall):
The Saj announced NHS modernisation that is in effect The Patient's Charter (1991: PM - John Major), Choose And Book (2005; PM - Tony Blair) and Personal Health Budgets (2008: PM - Gordon Brown).
All those policies failed. So too will Javid, as the committee has noted, in the process also noting the failures of Hancock and Hunt.
The NHS is not safe with the Tories. Not only do they want to undermine it, but they are also doing so.
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This unpleasant truth hides another unpleasant truth:- that at the cutting edge / on the frontline it is the NHS that will get it in the neck – not the Government.
And the way it works is that you end up with disgruntled, angry (and in this case scared) service users who will accept anything that is promised as an improvement even if it undermines the principles and delivery of the service.
That’s how it works in this country whether it’s railways, tramways utilities or health – run it down if you want to change it and manufacture the consent to abuse your power.
That’s without mentioning Covid mismanagement.
See my newsletter for NHSmanagers.net :https://files.constantcontact.com/9bc520cb001/45724f9c-1380-4b76-9934-c475d4d63f2b.pdf
Somehow the DHSC and the NHS spent an extra £52bn in 2020/21 alone which is only put into perspective when you compare it to other countries e.g. France who didn’t and had better performance.
That’s what living in a country with a cross party consensus on healthcare gets you.