Author: Andy Cowper

The executive chair of NHS foundation trust regulator Monitor has warned that the health service faces a £13 billion annual shortfall by 2013. Dr William Moyes told the Healthcare Financial Managers’ Association’s recent conference that the pre-Budget Report suggests that the NHS was likely to see annual budget growth beyond 2010-11 at just 1.1 per cent. The NHS has grown used to real-terms budget growth of around 7% in each of the past eight financial years.

The NHS is now half-way to its target for all hospital and mental health trusts to reach the semi-autonomous foundation trust (FT) status. However, the original deadline for all to be FTs was by the end of 2008.

At the NHS Confederation’s debate on the effects of recession on the NHS, former health secretaries Patricia Hewitt and Stephen Dorrell painted different scenarios of the likely effects of the credit crunch.

The Healthcare Commission’s final ‘State Of Healthcare 2008’ report to Parliament has attracted criticism for its figures about the error rate in primary care, although it notes significant improvements by the NHS.

The Department of Health’s director general of finance has warned the NHS that it must make urgent improvements in quality and productivity. David Flory told NHS finance managers at the recent Healthcare Financial Managers’ Association conference in London that the NHS will have “to deliver efficiencies and productivity like we have never done before.”