The British Medical Association has urged the government to increase health spending by £10bn a year to bring funding into line with other leading European economies and shore up the NHS.
The union for doctors said increasing health spending to a proportion of GDP that matched that of the 10 leading economies across Europe could pay for at least 35,000 extra beds a day and several thousand more GPs.
In a letter to the chancellor, Philip Hammond, before Wednesday’s budget, the BMA council chair, Dr Mark Porter, wrote: “Our members report that services are truly at breaking point, with unprecedented rising patient demand met only with financial restraint and directives for the NHS and social care to make huge, unachievable savings through sustainability and transformation plans (STPs) across England.
“We are not calling for more than other comparable nations, we are simply calling for you to match the average spending of other leading European economies. Based on our analysis of the figures available, this would, in 2015, have equated to an increase of £10.3bn for NHS funding; an increase which is desperately needed.”
The BMA’s call for substantial extra investment comes at a time when the NHS is feeling the strain amid rising demand, staff shortages and pressures on its finances. The service is supposed to be seeking to achieve £22bn in efficiency savings by 2020, which NHS England chief Simon Stevens said would still leave the service with an £8bn funding gap.
However, the health service in England is on course to overspend by £1bn by the end of the current financial year after running up a deficit of £2.45bn in the previous 12 months.
The BMA has been a vocal critic of the STPs, claiming they are unworkable and will not secure the sustainability of the NHS as they are intended to do but threaten it by reducing services on a drastic scale.
The reference in the letter to Hammond to the number of beds that could be funded is particularly emotive as several thousand beds in acute district general hospitals face being axed under STPs submitted by 44 areas.
Additionally, lost bed days due to patients being unable to be discharged because of constraints on community or social care, have hit record levels in recent months.
They were also partially blamed for a deterioration in NHS finances in England in the last three months of last year as providers lost income from elective operations because of a lack of capacity.
The BMA’s analysis suggests that the 10 leading economies across Europe spend an average of 10.4% of their GDP on health in comparison with the UK’s 9.8%, using the current definition from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to this, the UK’s spending on health in 2015 should have been £10.3bn higher than it was.
Porter said if the government matched its peer group it could recruit an extra 10,000 GPs, along with other healthcare professionals, and improve surgeries so that practices could host more staff and deliver additional appointments to patients.
It could also reverse cuts already made to the public health budget rather than introduce further reductions of almost 4% up until 2020, he added.
“The crisis currently facing the NHS and social care is well known and becoming increasingly severe – the government cannot remain a bystander any longer,” Porter wrote.
“An entire system under such strain is not due to frontline financial mismanagement, or individual chief executives’ poor decision making, it is due to the conscious underinvestment in our health service.”
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “We are committed to the NHS, which is why total health spending is above the OECD average as a percentage of GDP, and why we are investing £10bn in the NHS’s own plan for the future, including almost £4bn this year.
“What’s more, the NHS was ranked the best and most efficient healthcare system in the world by the independent Commonwealth Fund, showing that we make every bit of spending count.”
BMA calls for extra £10bn a year for NHS in Hammond"s budget
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