United Kingdom: National Health Service (NHS) news

Jonathan Edwards said:
What they really need to do is to axe the purchaser/provider separation the 'internal non-market'. That would save not just millions but billions.
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Is that the jolly procurement exercise currently underway in Sufolk and NE Essex!?

AI says,
The "internal non-market NHS" refers to the NHS structure before the 1990s, where regional health authorities controlled healthcare provision, and the 2019 NHS Long Term Plan aimed to move away from a market-based system by establishing integrated care systems. '
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Utsikt said:
As a non-brit - what’s that?
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When I said internal non-market I meant the 'Internal Market' invented by Margaret Thatcher's team that isn't market.

The NHS is divided into 'purchasers' and 'providers' as if there were market forces ensuring quality through competition but ineffective there is never any real competition and most of the time contracts go to bidders who seem cheap but fail to provide things like training.

The system perpetuates the bogus division between 'primary' and 'secondary' care, which is now a complete anachronism (if it ever made sense). It also perpetuates the myth that hospital care is 'expensive' by averaging out all the cost of all activities, including heart transplantation along with holiday vaccinations.

Vast sums of money are spent on staff who prepare and send bills between one half of the system and the other. The only possible reason to have such a system is to penny-pinch and penny-pinching is one of the most expensive things you can do within a public service.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
The NHS is divided into 'purchasers' and 'providers' as if there were market forces ensuring quality through competition but ineffective there is never any real competition and most of the time contracts go to bidders who seem cheap but fail to provide things like training.
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Sounds like something some of my economics professors would endorse.. Thank you for explaining!
 
Sean said:
In my experience of this world 'radical overhaul/reform' almost always is a cover for cost & service cuts. Rarely ends well.
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The Guardian 14/3/2025

'30,000 jobs could go in Labour’s radical overhaul of NHS'

'Loss of staff will be at least twice as big as thought, as new NHS England chief tells regional boards to cut costs by 50%'

'The jobs cull from the government’s radical restructuring of the NHS will be at least twice as big as previously thought, with other parts of the health service now being downsized too.

The staff shakeout caused by NHS England’s abolition and unprecedented cost-cutting elsewhere will mean the number of lost posts will soar from the 10,000 expected to between 20,000 and 30,000.'

'Senior figures running ICBs say the order to halve their running costs will make it impossible for them to undertake the full range of their activities, which include funding vaccination programmes, offering blood pressure checks and improving children’s dental health. ICBs have recently finished reducing their budgets by 20% as part of a previous round of cost-saving.'

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...s-could-go-in-labours-radical-overhaul-of-nhs

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Hey, got to cut costs, so the money can go to the already ridiculously rich.

Imagine if instead of an income tax brought in to pay for WW2, they'd brought in a wealth tax. The more you have, the higher you pay. The rich could still play their game of "who has more $$$", but the difference between the top and the average would be much smaller, as would be their political power.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/09/nhs-hospitals-england-cuts-financial-reset

Also cuts to end of life care and those virtual wards it seems.
Goodness knows what it all means.
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At my rheumatology appointment last week, Consultant told me that local hospital has to make £50 million of cuts and local teaching hospital £100 million.
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“These [savings targets] are at eye-wateringly high levels”, said Saffron Cordery, the interim chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts. “It’s going to be extremely challenging.”

Trusts have to make, in some cases, deep cuts in order to stay in the black this year, despite the government having given the NHS an extra £22bn for last year and this one." ( Guardian, link above)
 
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John Mac said:
I always thought that talking therapies were a way for the NHS to save money by replacing actual care with a cheaper alternative.
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Yeah it's seriously ironic that a program that is itself packaged austerity is being killed by... austerity. It's like Dr Frankeinstein had created two monsters and they're killing each other. They're still wrecking the whole place in the process, though.

But of course the premise that this ideological model would save money was always a scam, this is just a very late reveal that the biopsychosocial model's promises are starting to lose their appeal. After all the only benefit they can claim is saving money, and even that's fake. They've had years to prove it, and it's not going to get any better for them. It's one thing to run a good scam, but it takes fools to want to take the scam public and have it scrutinized. And absolute fools they sure are.

Most likely, though, is they replace it with an even worse, cheaper and dumber, version of the same thing, with the same promises. That should get them a few years worth of funding this life vacuum. Until the new monster grows up and they need to bring back the OG monster to fight it again.
 
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