Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
In the past four years, it's risen by more like 0.8%.
And the problem is we've got a growing population.
The population's also grown by about 0.8% every year over the past four years.
So you can immediately see a problem with the sums.
What's more, we've got an ageing population, and that means doctors and nurses are seeing patients with more complex health needs, which need more time and money to treat.
So just to give you an idea, this was a really striking statistic I came across.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckoned that the actual effect of that ageing population is that there's almost 10% less to spend on each individual as a result.
Now, Labour argues that the coalition government is also to blame for
the challenges the NHS has been facing.
It points to the fact that other areas like the social care budget has been cut, meaning that people who in the past would have been helped by social care staff are now turning up at A&E, perhaps with more acute problems than they would have done.
However, it's actually hard to prove that with data, but experts I've spoken to do say they think it is happening.
Yeah, well, so this number came from a report by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, as you mentioned.
The report came out in October.
And basically it said that the NHS is facing an annual £30 billion shortfall by 2020.
Now, this £30 billion black hole, that doesn't actually mean the budget has to go up by £30 billion.
I mean, he's made an estimate of how much the services need will cost annually.
and that it would be £30 billion to keep things as they are, the standard as they are, if we didn't manage to make the NHS more efficient and productive.
But if we can deliver NHS services in a more efficient way and get more treatments per pound, then we won't need an extra £30 billion.
It could be £5 billion, £10 billion extra that politicians have to spend.
In his report, he suggests that it would be £8 billion that they'd have to stump up if we...
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