Hunt says £2 billion is for 'change'

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the £2 billion ‘additional’ funding that Chancellor George Osborne will announce in his autumn statement will be used to support change in the NHS.

Speaking at a Reform conference, Hunt said the coalition was behind the ‘Five Year Forward View’ drawn up by Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, to try and close a projected funding gap of £30 billion by 2020-21.

“This week, the government, the Chancellor, have said ‘ we accept this plan’ and we are backing it with the money the NHS is asking for next year; which is the only year for which a spending review is in place,” he said.

Osborne’s announcement was widely trailed at the weekend, but the headline figure of £2 billion has been challenged by Labour, which accused him of ‘recycling’ cash.

While the money is new in the sense that it was not previously allocated to the NHS, around £750m is coming from an under-spend in the commissioning system and “non-frontline” savings.

Around £200m has already been earmarked for bailing out trusts in financial distress. However, speakers at the think-tank conference warned it was essential that any new money did more than this.

Sir David Dalton, the chief executive of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, who is about to deliver a report on new models for smaller hospitals, said it would be a “missed opportunity” if it was “soaked up” in bailing out organisations in difficulty.

Hunt said change was essential if the NHS was going to cope with an ageing population, which he described as “the political challenge of our generation.”

Reprising other recent speeches, he said his ‘four pillars’ for the NHS of the future were a “strong economy”, “better care for people with long-term conditions”, the faster uptake of technology, and better “accountability and transparency”.

He said that to create “stability”, the government was looking at introducing “multi-year planning and commissioning”; while a move to introduce costing for individual patients would help clinical commissioners to invest in innovation by making clear any cost benefit.

He also argued that initiatives such as the recent release of “4,000 pieces of data” onto the MyNHS website, would help staff and patients to see how the NHS was doing, and support a shift from “top-down management” to “peer review” of services.

Speaking earlier in the afternoon, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham outlined similar ideas about the direction of travel for health and social care, and the mechanisms for getting there.

He said Labour was on a “ten year journey” to create an integrated health and social care system, and that he wanted a personalised service, focused on caring for individuals in their home whenever possible.

He said his drivers for achieving this would be a ‘year of care’ tariff to pay for both health and social care that would incentivise prevention, and new rights in the NHS constitution to encourage personalisation.

Returning to the £2 billion due to be announced today, Burnham also warned it was essential that it was not sucked into acute care and that any further increases were not paid for by further cuts to social care. If this happened, he warned, patients would become “stuck” in increasingly “dysfunctional” hospitals.

Despite the near-universal support for integration at #reformhealth, speakers were asked whether it could really deliver the scale of savings needed by 2020-21.

Tony Lambert of Monitor said he hoped it could; while noting that the Five Year Forward View’s plans “depend on continued investment in the next Parliament” that is, as yet, unknown. The plan itself estimates that about £8 billion of additional funding will be needed.

Ian Dodge, who became national director of commissioning at NHS England in July said he was “optimistic”; and that the NHS might do better.

“We have built in an efficiency kicker that suggest if we get it right the increase in efficiency could increase from 2% to 3% towards the end of the [next] Parliament,” he said.

Source EHI 3 December 2014   Lyn Whitfield; http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/9775/hunt-says-£2-billion-is-for-’change’

Hunt says £2 billion is for 'change'