Our NHS, Our Future

Everyone agrees that the NHS is going to have to save money – David Nicholson, for instance, speaks about saving £15-20bn between 2011 and 2014, largely through efficiency measures. The question isn’t about whether we need to make savings then, but how.

Quality, of course, is one way to achieve this: by improving the efficiency of care, we can reduce its cost. Prevention, too, can cut the healthcare budget, simply by reducing demand for healthcare through education and healthier lifestyles. The management consultants McKinsey & Company, meanwhile, have reported the NHS should cut 10% of its staff and freeze recruitment to save £20bn (the Health Service Journal has seen the report; the Telegraph and the Times have both picked up on the story).

The BBC report that the government has rejected this proposal, and this is good news – we can only achieve quality care by retaining the expertise of the NHS’s exceptional staff. Saving money without achieving quality does not secure the NHS’s future, but rather puts it in jeapardy. As Mike O’Brien put it to the BBC, The government does not believe the right answer to improving the NHS now or in the future is to cut the NHS workforce. In core frontline services like maternity, nursing and primary care we need more staff rather than fewer.

At the blog of The King’s Fund (who you’ll remember published a report in July focussing on the need to lower costs), Mark Jennings makes the case for quality, and for finding ways to achieve at a lower cost. This is exactly the right approach. We’ll continue to talk here about the real way forward for the NHS – quality, innovation and prevention together can increase productivity and therefore save money.