NHS: Finance

(asked on 22nd June 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the total savings required to be made under the capped expenditure process.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 27th June 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’ plan, enabling it to deliver key priorities like seven day care, improved access to cancer treatments and better mental health services.

All public services, including 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.

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