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£1.75bn surplus down to strong financial management, says DH

  • Published: 28 August 2008 12:18
  • Last Updated: 28 August 2008 12:18
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The Department of Health says its predicted surplus of £1.75bn in 2008-09 shows strong financial management by the NHS.

But the quarterly performance figures were criticised by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "There continue to be hospitals whose finances are far from stable as we can see from the number of PCTs who are rationing access to medicines."

The DH's quarterly performance report is available at www.dh.gov.uk


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Reader Response

Added: Friday, 29 August 2008 12:37 BST
Anonymous, Morpeth, United Kingdom

Entirely agree with Anonymous: much of this surplus will be from freezing or cutting posts, including clinical ones. My service has had vacant, non-advertised posts for up to 2 years.

Also, many trusts simply do not pay bills: mine regularly waits up to a year to pay for courses or conferences, and recently one supplier of assessment forms we use on a daily basis stopped supplying to us for non-payment of bills.

Strong financial management? Typical department double think: more like incompetence and cynical manipulation.


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Added: Thursday, 28 August 2008 16:58 BST
Anonymous, Isleworth, United Kingdom

Cut backs in nursing establishments on the wards to dangerous levels, unacceptably high bed occupancy rates, redundancies in support staffing and closure of clinical services does not good financial management make. If this government actually encouraged continuous care process improvement by facilitating multi-discipilnery teams to set their own standards, instead of having top-down dictatorship in the form of meaningless targets, then we might actually have real savings concommitant with better care, rather than declining quality of care caused by lack of resources.


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