Tag Archives: patients care

Revealed: the damning figures that show the NHS can’t cope with patient demand

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St George’s University Foundation Trust’s A & E department Pic credit: health trust

If you thought the NHS was at breaking point and want to know why – the National Audit Office have today provided a handy fact and figures guide to the decline of the country’s most cherished service.

A new report from Parliament’s financial watchdog charts the scale of both the failure of the NHS to respond to emergencies fast enough and the unprecedented demand from the public to use its facilities in the 13 years the NHS has been run by the Tories and the coalition government.

These are the startling figures:

711,881 A&E patients waiting over four hours from arrival to be admitted, transferred or discharged in December 2022, an all-time high. Since fallen to just over 550,000 in March this year.

90,998 ambulance handovers to A&E taking longer than 30 minutes in March 2023, equivalent to 25.9% of all ambulance handovers

32.0m reported number of appointments in general practice provided in October 2022, an all-time high, compared with 27.1 million reported in October 2018

92.3% general and acute hospital beds occupied during Q4 2022-23,representing record levels

88 seconds mean time to answer 999 calls related to health issues in December 2022, an all-time high

July 2015 the last time the NHS met its target for 95% of A&E patients to be admitted, transferred, or discharged within four hours of their arrival

8.4 million 111 calls answered within 60 seconds in 2021-22, compared with 11.2 million to 13.3 million between 2014-15 and 2020-21

1.27 million full-time equivalent NHS staff in February 2023, compared with the most recent low of 0.96 million in June 2013

£21.5 billion estimated annual cost in 2020-21 of providing the services reviewed in this report

Big variations in different regions in England

Delving deeper into the figures there are big variations in different regions of the UK. For example those being admitted, treated and discharged from A&E within four hours varied between 67.9 per cent in the East of England to 75.9 percent in the South East – both noticeably lower than the standard 95 per cent treated in that time just after the Tories got into power in 2011.

Similarly among ambulance response times there were wide variations. In 2021-22, the mean Category 1 (life threatening incidents like strokes and heart attacks) incident response time for the London ambulance service was 6 minutes 51 seconds compared with 10 minutes 20 seconds for the South-West ambulance service.,

In the same year the mean Category 2 incident response time for the ambulance service in the Isle of Wight was 26 minutes 20 seconds, compared with 1 hour 1 minute 57 seconds for the South-West ambulance service.

Some other points emerge why this is happening. The growing elderly population and general population increase in the UK is increasing demands on the NHS and effects of the Covid pandemic has left its mark.

More staff recruited but more off sick from stress

The government can claim it has recruited more NHS staff, including GPs and ambulance drivers. But this has been offset by more staff going off sick and more staff leaving the NHS because they can’t cope with the workload. I should not think the government’s attitude to keeping down pay rises in the middle of a cost of living crisis has helped either.

The government is promising a great £2.5 billion recovery programme and has allocated the extra money. But the NAO report says:

“More people than ever before are receiving unplanned and urgent NHS care every day. To support these services, the NHS is spending increasing amounts of public money and employing record numbers of people. Nevertheless, patients’ satisfaction and access to services have been worsening, suggesting there is no single, straightforward solution to improving what is a complex and interdependent
system.”

The real test will come next winter -since the government is promising much better services by March 2024. If it fails it will just add to the multiple problems facing this government and increase the distrust between the public and politicians.

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How the NHS wasted £16m of your money on a botched privatisation that collapsed within months

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Meg Hillier MP:,chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, condemned the failings in the scheme

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New ways of  helping the elderly and mentally ill survive in the community and not continually end up in hospital is a cornerstone of government policy.

So when a limited liability partnership offered a cash strapped  NHS commissioning group an initiative which promised better services for these people and could save them £178m over five years it sounded too good to be true.

The trouble is it was. As a devastating report from the National Audit Office reveals today the £800m scheme  ran into trouble just four weeks after it was launched and collapsed seven months later. You can read the full story on the Exaro website.

The scandal of the £800m scheme run by UnitingCare Partnership for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough clinical commissioning group may not be an isolated instance.That is why sources at the National Audit Office have highlighted it in their report – because it exposes an alarming lack of financial expertise inside the NHS and a flawed system to monitor whether projects like this are financially feasible  andcan  be properly checked.

The promised aim of the project was to establish  tapering payments to the partnership – with £152m up front and less money later, ¬ so that the financially challenged commissioning group could put money to better use.

But within four weeks of starting the contract the partnership was asking for an extra £34m, blaming a delay by the commissioning authority in starting the work. When the money was not forthcoming the scheme collapsed after eight months and the NHS was forced to provide services directly.

The NAO report reveals that despite employing reputable financial companies and lawyers, basic errors were made – including a failure to realise that sub-contractors could not recover the VAT from the partnership – a cost that had not been factored into the contract.

Auditors also report that nobody had overall oversight of the contract.

No wonder both Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, and Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee have been withering in their criticism.

Amyas Morse said: “This contract was innovative and ambitious but ultimately an unsuccessful venture, which failed for financial reasons which could, and should, have been foreseen.”

Meg Hillier said: “The result is damning: a contract terminated before the ink had even dried out, at an unnecessary cost of £16m.”

What is disturbing is that the NAO point out that Monitor, the body which checks health bodies, had no locus to check whether the scheme was viable and NHS England were too remote to act.”

The report says: ““No organisation was responsible for taking a holistic view of the risks and benefits of this approach, or considering whether the anticipated longer‐term benefits were sufficient to justify additional short‐term support.“

What is really disturbing  is that £16m was wasted -plus £8.9m  on setting up a complex tendering operation and start up costs.

Far better to have spent this extra money on patient and community care – instead of throwing our money down the drain on a scheme that anyone would have thought to be too good to be true.