NHS can’t take more social care cuts

UK health service leaders have warned that the NHS can no longer take any spending cuts to social care funding.

In a recent poll of 313 senior managers of NHS care bodies, 99% warned that cuts to social care funding would pile up extra pressure on the health service.

The poll of health leaders was conducted by Populus for the NHS Confederation.

Official figures suggest that social care budgets have already been cut by 12% in cash terms under the coalition government.

Keith Pilbeam, Professor of International Economics and Finance at City University, believes that the cuts will negatively affect the UK health service.

“Cutting social care budget is quite difficult because the demand is going up and yet the cash is going down and eventually you are going to have a very poor service and very poor quality,” the London-based analyst told Press TV on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Tory government has announced a clamp down on “rip off” staffing agencies used by the NHS.

The government believe that using the agencies are a “rip off” and that more needs to be done on restricting their use. £2 billion was spent last year on agency staff by trusts in England. Trusts that are struggling financially are to receive a cap on the amount they can spend on agencies, as well as a maximum spend on hourly rates.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said "The NHS is a public service and needs to show restraint on handing out generous pay packages as a matter of course…Expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS.

"It's outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor…The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we'll use that bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game."

Records have shown that the agencies being deployed by the NHS are costing the health service billions of extra pounds, including several cases where a substantial amount of the money allocated for wages end up in agency hands. But the agencies body has said that they are being “scapegoated for the NHS’s own mismanagement of workforce planning.”

During this year’s general election campaign, the major parties clashed over the best way to take the NHS forward. Labour made the health service a key part of their campaign, promising to spend billions of pounds extra to fix it whilst saying the Tories can’t be trusted on keeping the health service in public hands. Andy Burnham, shadow health secretary and front-runner for the Labour leadership, has said, "The Tory government is responsible for this monumental waste of NHS resources."

LM/HA