On December 5th, Health Minister Lesley Griffiths announced that the NHS in Wales will get an extra £82 millon to help it balance the books. The Minister pledged the cash after repeatedly telling health boards that there was no extra money to help them break even and that financial bailouts were a thing of the past.
The cash, the Minister said, was ‘not a bailout’ rather it was a response to ‘unprecedented’ pressures on the NHS this year, particularly in emergency care for older people. She could pull the other one. Caring for older people should not have come as a surprise to anyone and blaming our senior citizens for the shambolic way in which she has managed NHS finances beggars belief.
Older people were users of NHS services last year, and they will be users of services next year too. Demands on services as a result of demographic change are easier to predict now than ever before. But a one off injection of cash simply amounts to a sticking plaster over the ongoing cost pressures which an ageing population brings.
The reality is that the Minister's extra funding comes just weeks after the Wales Audit Office (WAO) forecasted the NHS was heading towards a financial shortfall of £70m by the start of the next financial year in April 2013. Worryingly, the WAO suggested a worst-case scenario of being more than £130m in the red, which could mean that even with the extra cash, under the bleakest assessments, the NHS could still be £50 million short.
Such damning figures ought to be a wake-up call to the Welsh Labour Government, which is presiding over record-breaking NHS cuts of almost half a billion pounds and driving our entire health system to breaking point. These cuts are the deepest of any of the UK nations and they are beginning to bite hard on frontline services.
Whilst there is no doubt that rooting out inefficiency will help, this will not be sufficient to close the gap and the NHS is already creaking at the seams. Waiting lists are missed month after month, cancer patients face a postcode lottery for drugs, and vital neonatal units are facing crushing downgrades. And on top of all this, despite the hard work of staff emergency departments are in turmoil - with targets missed, ambulances queuing and bed blocking persisting.
Health boards have been pushed to the edge of a cliff and there’s no way back. The financial challenge they are facing is driving unpopular service change; making performance targets more difficult to achieve and putting immense pressure on hardworking frontline staff.
Lurching messily from one bailout to the next simply adds to the sense of crisis and does not resolve the underlying financial challenges faced by the NHS in the longer term. But while the rest of us worry about what this means for the future of our health service, the First Minister and his Health Minister seem completely oblivious to the storm gathering around our vital services..
Instead of slashing budgets and axing services, the Welsh Government ought to give the NHS the priority it deserves and provide the additional investment it needs.
We already know that as a result of the extra cash announced on the 5th December, the financial black hole next year will be £82 millon bigger than this year so unless Ministers ditch their dangerous complacency, and get a real grip on the financial pressures facing the health service, the Welsh NHS will continue to be the sick man of Britain.