NHS: Finance

(asked on 3rd July 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will place in the Library a copy of (a) the document circulated to NHS officials in London on 25 May 2017 on the effect of the capped expenditure process, (b) any equivalent document circulated to such officials in other areas affected by the capped expenditure process and (c) the letter referred to in the 27 June 2017 edition of the Health Service Journal.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 13th July 2017

The National Health Service and wider health system has examined how to sustain and improve care – which produced the NHS Five Year Forward View. The Government committed to providing an additional £10 billion in real terms by 2020-21 to back the NHS’s plan, enabling it to deliver key priorities like seven day care, improved access to cancer treatments and better mental health services.

All public services, local NHS areas need to live within the budget agreed – otherwise they effectively take up resources that could be spent on general practitioners, mental health care, and cancer treatment. As part of their financial planning, NHS England and NHS Improvement have been running a process to look at how a small number of areas could do more to balance their financial plans, as many already have.

The NHS is required to meet its operational standards as set out in the mandate and ensure access to appropriate care for all, in line with the NHS constitution. It is right that the NHS should consider efficiency savings such as reducing delayed transfers of care, reducing running costs, or reviewing treatments that are of low clinical effectiveness – because this improves patient care overall.

NHS England and NHS Improvement have designed and implemented the capped expenditure process working with the local NHS.

Local communications are not held centrally.

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