NHS: Cost-effectiveness

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I must point out one thing about this report: it does not make any claims for how cost-effective our health system was at any given point in time. What it does is measure the improvement in mortality over a period and then assess the cost-effectiveness of that improvement, which is a very different thing. Yes, the NHS has made great strides in improving mortality rates, but that is the only metric that the report deals with. It completely ignores other measures of quality. It is also completely silent about anything that happened after 2005, so recent years are not covered.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

Is not the really difficult and vital context in which we find ourselves at the moment the fact that we need significantly to improve productivity in the NHS in line with the so-called Nicholson challenge, which was endorsed by both this Government and the previous one? Can the Minister remind us of the record under the previous Government and tell us what he expects to be the outcome of the current health reforms?

[Earl Howe]

I am grateful to my noble friend. A Written Answer was published in Hansard recently that tracked the changes in productivity of the NHS between 1996 and 2008. He will know if he read it that there was a decrease in productivity over that period of around 3.1 per cent. The pressures on the NHS are increasing. In order for it to respond to the needs of the future, including an ageing population and the cost of new technologies, it needs to adapt to new ways of working that reduce cost pressures while delivering improved outcomes. The measures that are before Parliament seek to do just that.