Rising budget but NHS will still have to find more savings, says watchdog
SCOTLAND’S NHS is facing an “unprecedented” funding squeeze, according to a hard-hitting report from a public sector spending watchdog. Health boards across the country were warned they will have to find “significantly more” financial savings year-on-year due to the increased pressures on funding from soaring wage bills, increased drug prescription costs and more expensive fuel for NADVERTISEMENTHS vehicles, according to the newly published paper from Audit Scotland.
Auditor General for Scotland Robert Black claimed that although the NHS budget will rise during 2011-12, any increase would be “far smaller than previous years” sparking fears of a real terms cut in key health services.
Scotland Patients Association chair Margaret Watt said that the smaller increase could mean “cutbacks” in frontline services.
The Audit Scotland report said that all NHS bodies had met their spending targets that year and revealed that the service had underspent by £43 million during the year – about 0.4 per cent of the £10.9 billion budget.
However, Mr Black warned that any savings were likely to be “outstripped by rises in patient demand and other cost pressures such as workforce costs, drug spending and fuel prices, and thus is part of the longer term challenges that NHS boards face”.
“The financial performance of the NHS in Scotland during 2009-10 was good,” he said. “But the health service now faces fiscal pressures that are unprecedented since devolution.”
Mr Black went on to say that savings could be made in improved “productivity” and better “workforce planning” as well as cooperating more with other bodies such as councils and Scotland’s voluntary sector.
He said that health boards will “have had to find significant savings to balance their budgets and will need to find even more to continue to do so”.
There was also a stark warning in the report that Scotland’s NHS faced a “major challenge to continue to maintain service levels and quality within the budgets available to them”.
Ms Watt called for any savings to be made from costs associated with “top heavy management” rather than NHS beds, operations and funding for nurses and doctors.
She said: “We’re very concerned that talk about smaller increases could mean cutbacks for key patient services.
“Savings can be made, but they should come from top heavy management and certainly not from spending on services.”
Scotland’s Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon said the Scottish Government would protect frontline services and claimed any savings could be made through reducing waste as well as improving productivity and efficiences.
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