Why is the NHS Doing Fewer Operations Than Before the Pandemic Despite Having More Money and Staff?
Hospitals are still performing fewer operations and scans each month than before Covid, despite being given billions more taxpayer cash and being better staffed, as the waiting list continues to soar above 7 million. The Mail has more.
Analysis shows the health service in England carried out 600,000 fewer procedures in the first nine months of 2022, compared to the same period in 2019.
The slump in activity, noted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has been logged even though its budget grew by nearly £30 billion over the same period and fewer people than expected joined the queue for treatment.
IFS economists suggested that health bosses will now struggle to meet their pledge of boosting pre-pandemic capacity by 30% from 2024 – which the NHS was given an extra £10billion per year until 2025 to tackle.
The overall waiting list – already at an all-time high of 7.1 million – could keep rising “well beyond next year’ if the NHS fails to increase its activity, it said.
Ben Zaranko, one of the IFS economists behind the report, noted that there are also 13% more doctors – including 10% more consultants – as well as 11% more nurses and 10% more clinical staff in the NHS now compared to 2019.
More money, more staff, fewer joining the queue – yet fewer patients actually being treated and ever-lengthening waiting lists. And now a load more tax to fund yet higher NHS spending as the budget increases by a further £3.3bn.
What’s going on?
Worth reading in full.
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I’m sure many factors are at work but it seems like the lockdowns, furlough etc. have engendered a general slackness and lack of effort and urgency in many people.
It’s a bloated bureaucratic monstrosity which is grossly inefficient and a huge waste of taxpayers money, which will simply help to drive us into deeper economic recession. That is why it will be kept as is.
All government departments will happily spend all the money they’ve been granted plus a little bit more, and then ask for more money. No government department will ever say that they can manage fine with less money (except in rare cases where a renegade has been put in charge — they’ll then be fired).
The purpose of central government is to keep this process in check.
The NHS seems to have managed to get itself into a position where the usual control systems have broken and it is now out of control. I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done to fix this.
But it’s “the envy of the world” don’t you know? Ho bloody ho ho
.. noted that there are also 13% more doctors – including 10% more consultants – as well as 11% more nurses and 10% more clinical staff in the NHS now compared to 2019
Is that actually credible? Where have they all appeared from? Retrained during lockdown from being chefs, bar staff, waiting staff …? I don’t think so.
One of the plainest, clearest lessons of the last three years is to question everything we’re told, especially when it involves figures.
These extra medics are the cohort of retired medics who had their registration automatically extended to swell the workforce. So yes, there are more medics registered but as they’re not employed the workforce is shrinking.
You’re correct, it’s all lies.
This ^^^^ I also read about this; the number of doctors and even nurses has been artificially inflated by re-activating masses of retired doctors, in order to support govt claims that they have increased the numbers.
Good point, and may well be a large part of the explanation. Certainly a question worth asking.
A better set of figures would be total hours worked for doctors, consultants, nurses and so on. My guess is that a fair few of the permanent staff have since lockdowns gone on to part-time hours – so for the same numbers of total staff, fewer hours total worked.
Baseline assumption: everything is just a f*****g lie.
58% of UK doctors work three days per week or less.
Thing is, haven’t working conditions brought this about?
They are well paid, and many won’t need to work full time to make ends meet. And if the job is arduous, with long hours, isn’t there a massive incentive to go part time?
Exactly. I know a helluva lot of people who work in the NHS. I can’t think of one who works full-time.
The effect and problem of women now dominating med school enrollment.
Indeed. A recently retired GP who I work with occasionally has admitted exactly that.
That’s the WTE or whole time equivalent which in my field hasn’t changed just more part timers working as the emotional pressure on top of the beaurocratic pile of shite & actual clinical part of the job is just too much to take full time.
That’s true, however, both doctor & nurse numbers are up since 2010 while hospital beds are down.
It’s also important to look at the number of Whole Time Equivalent doctors there are. If this number has increased, then great, if this number has reduced or stayed the same then it’s just more individual doctors registered with no real world impact on the actual work.
That does beg for an explanation (if true …). If the additional care isn’t happening in the hospitals well it certainly isn’t happening in the community.
So where have the xtras gone? Part time? (see above.)
Extra money is being diverted in to the NHS. I am at the point where I no longer believe this is entirely true. Nominally money is allegedly going into NHS accounts but how it is spent is another matter.
We may well have a home grown version of the Ukrainian situation – millions of dollars leaving the United States and then miraculously appearing back in Democrats accounts. It’s not as if there is evidence of Ukraine actually spending the money they allegedly receive is it?
So, money to the NHS is actually a diversionary tactic which allows taxpayer’s money to be stolen and siphoned away to the elites. No wonder the bill for “administrators” is growing as fast as the national debt, somebody has to keep this under wraps.
Now that’s what I call a conspiracy theory!
It’s beyond repair, a money sucking black hole.
It needs the Musk/Icahn treatment. ASAP.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S6sfj1LpK2g
My 85 year-old Dad was put on a waiting list six months ago for retina surgery. Our local hospital had blocked all eye operations for a couple of years. You couldn’t even go privately. In the last six months his eye became far worse. He had the op two weeks ago and was told it was very bad because of the delay. He saw the specialist – who is one of the best in the country – today and has been told the operation has failed and he’s now blind in that eye.
And we have feature writers in the Daily Mail saying they fancy Matt Hancock…
My sister in law was seconded to the NHS legal department as an advisor around 2019. She described not being allowed to print a pdf document from her laptop. It would need printed in an NHS department designated specifically to print pdf documents. The process would be predictably painful, and she would have a lot of documents to print. She’s also described how any action had to be run through a very specific and inflexible chain of command, with everyone in that chain sticking strictly to the boundaries of their role. This meant that if anyone was off sick (as tended to happen a lot), the whole process would be paralysed, and nothing would get done. A friend worked as a senior (band 6) researcher. She would describe the substantial sums her department were given to needlessly duplicate data gathering already carried out by academia and charities. The processes she described by which her department would gather data / volunteers for studies sounded amateurish at best, and guaranteed to lead to poor datasets, feeding garbage into important research. She would describe how at events promoting awareness of issues and touting for volunteers, she would see band 9 (the most senior)… Read more »
Good grief. Your poor sister in law.
You might mean my sister.. Thankfully she’s made a pretty good (though not full) recovery from her stroke.
I apologise.
No need at all, but thank you 🙂
So sorry to hear about your sister and her resulting ill health, but pleased to hear that she has some recovery.
Your picture of the petty, vicious, vindictive bullying and incompetence is a true reflection of the NHS, the self styled “envy of the world”. My wife suffered a similar approach but cut her losses and got out before it impacted her health.
I hope your sister’s health continues to improve.
Thank you, I know she’d appreciate that. The picture is unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. I’m glad your wife had the determination to move on when it was causing damage – it can’t be an easy thing to do when you’ve invested so much time and energy into a career.
In recent years the NHS as a bureaucracy has developed a really unhealthy relationship with the public through political activism and PR, which along the same lines of other areas of ideological activism, looks a lot like Munchausen’s by proxy.
The NHS desperately needs an enema. It is the epitome of bureaucratic sloth and waste, tied up with non-jobs and functions that add nothing to patient care, but which soak up the cash and add layer upon layer of un-necessary regulation and activity on the people trying to do the job.
The only solution is to break it up, reduce its scope to urgent care, (Its a health service, not a ‘wellness’ service), and allow people to build their own insurance around it. More than anything it needs to stop being free at the point of care. People will always take the piss out of something that is ‘free’.
Your points are well made. Something which is ‘free’ has no value to people.
A big part of the explanation is that since 2020/21 hospitals are no long funded per item of activity but via a block contract with activity targets. Consequently, they don’t lose income if they provide less treatment. The incentives to be productive have gone and staff have got used to doing less work.
Another important factor is that sickness absence rates have doubled due largely to mass testing for Covid and ten days of isolation for those testing positive.
A further important factor is increased bed occupancy due to the loss of capacity in the care home sector following the vaccine mandate. This results in a lot of inpatient elective surgery being cancelled due to lack of beds.
A slightly different take on this would be to question how many routine surgical procedures are actually necessary?
At least in Australia, multiple spinal fusions for back pain and arthroscopies for knee arthritis are still performed, despite no evidence that they actually help.
We could add to that a number of knee replacements, which are often less effective than weight loss and exercise (which is largely how I treat knee arthritis).
Anecdotally, I see many patients who are actually worse after having these procedures.
From April 2020 hospitals were moved to a block funding arrangement where they got paid the same regardless of activity. Previously their income was linked directly to the amount of treatments they provided. The incentive to productivity has been removed and staff have got used to doing less work.
it is also notable that sickness absence rates are around twice what they were before2020 due to the ongoing Covid testing and isolation procedures. Also, there are fewer beds available for elective surgery because of the care home crisis which means much greater delays in discharging patients from hospital.
A further factor is that senior medical staff are seldom willing to work overtime now to undertake additional sessions at weekends. The pension taxation regime penalises overtime and they can earn more in the private sector doing work NHS hospitals used to do.
Having got away with doing nothing (excluding Tik Tok videos) in the scamdemic the NHS has realised nobody can tell them what to do. So now they’re taking the P155 big time so more money is hosed over the organisation to fund extra 000’s of Diversity Leads, Directors, Project Coordinators etc etc
I imagine a lot of it is having the will to do it – my consultant atSheffield’s RHH removed a couple of tumours from my brain on Saturday and a while there a lot of staff in the hospital, albeit fewr than I’d usually see, they were there, bless, ’em. Unlike Sheffied’s taxi drivers which were like hen’s teeth.