Another story to sour Andrew Lansley’s cornflakes this morning: the King’s Fund has released a “monitoring report” into the NHS which highlights, among other things, that hospital waiting times are at a 3-year high. The figures they have used are available on the Department of Health website — but unshackled from Excel files, and transcribed into graph form (see above, click for a larger version), they are now, it seems, a discussion point. The Today Programme tried to bait a couple of NHS chieftains on the matter earlier. The worst they could extract from either of them was that, “[waiting times] haven’t got massively longer now, but people are worried about the future.”
Although the coverage is centred firmly on how many patients are waiting longer than Labour’s 18-week target, it’s worth dwelling on a few other points in the King’s Fund report. The bulk of it is actually a survey of NHS finance directors, asking how they are going to deal with the savings and reforms that await. And their answers are, in many cases, revealing. On meeting productivity targets, for instance, “Reducing workforce or capacity (beds or services) was mentioned most often.” On how the government can help, “The strongest theme was a desire for the government to be more realistic.” On cutting bureaucracy, rather than care, “Others asked for realism on … the extent to which reducing back-office costs could be a solution.”
Of course, these anonymous health-service professionals would say all that, wouldn’t they? But it’s still some measure of the institutional mood within the NHS. As the government labours on with its “listening exercise,” the debate is reducing to one about the effect of “cuts” on services, waiting times, jobs, etc. Cameron and Lansley must have hoped for something quite different when they erected that ringfence around the NHS, a couple of years ago.
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