NHS facing financial crisis, says BMA |
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Published
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Mon, 26 Sep 2005 09:05
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LONDON - A survey by the British Medical Association has found that many National Health Service Trusts in the country are facing a severe shortfall of funds and could be forced to shut shop unless drastic measures are taken.
The BMA has brought of these findings based on a questionnaire sent out to 530 medical doctors who work in 172 hospital and 303 primary care trusts in the UK. The BMA got a response form 120 doctors among whom three quarters said that their trusts were facing a funding crisis in the region of £200,000 to £25 million.
"It is financial madness to guarantee private providers huge volumes of work, often at a higher cost than the NHS, while NHS hospitals are deprived of essential funding and their facilities are being left idle," said Dr Paul Miller, chairman of the BMA's consultants committee. Almost 37 percent of the respondents said that their trust intended to reduce the services that they provide in order to cope with the deficit.
"It is hard to understand why, at a time when the government has invested unprecedented funding in the health service, trusts may have to lay off staff and close wards. Something is going terribly wrong when patients pay the price for these financial problems and the government's lack of joined-up thinking," said Miller.
In August the BMA had raised concerns that there was something wrong in the NHS and had informed Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt about the situation. However, health minister Rosie Winterton said that the overspend was just about 0.4 percent of the total NHS outlay, "The vast majority of NHS organizations were in surplus or balance and this overspend followed three financial years when the NHS has had under spends of similar sizes," she pointed out adding that trusts were getting a 7 percent increase in their budgets for this year. But the issue refuses to cool down and could come out at the Labour conference in Brighton next week.
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