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NHS Deficits

The Government have invested unprecedented levels of funding in the NHS since 1997. Funding will have trebled by the end of the coming financial year, but in times of such plenty, the money is sometimes not invested as wisely as it should be. Certainly, there have been significant improvements in patient care, there is improved access to health services, and waiting lists are no longer the issue that they were back in 1997, but it is vital that all NHS organisations look carefully at the way in which they provide services to patients to ensure that they are delivering the best possible value for money. For instance, it often does not make sense to send patients to accident and emergency, as better management of their condition at home would save money—going to A and E costs hundreds of pounds—and provide much better care and outcomes for them. It has certainly been a difficult two years for the health economy of north Staffordshire, where my constituency is located. The Secretary of State frequently says that overspending is concentrated in the healthier and wealthier parts of the country, but that is not the case in north Staffordshire. We may be the exception that proves the rule, because north Staffordshire has been historically underfunded. That issue must be examined urgently, although I recognise that the historical underfunding is not the only problem that north Staffordshire faces. We saw great headlines about 1,000 redundancies at the University hospital of North Staffordshire, and stories about the way in which that would devastate the local economy. I checked the figures today, and the reality is somewhat different. The figures are, in fact, 150 redundancies, of which 45 are compulsory—that is a little bit different from the 1,000 redundancies that were headlined in the local paper.