Patients to suffer as NHS overspend triples

Hospitals in England have tripled the amount by which they have exceeded their budgets, a state of affairs that experts say will have a knock-on effect on patient care.

Hospital, ambulance and mental health trusts were in debt by a record £2.45bn in the financial year 2015 to 2016, NHS chiefs say. That's almost three times the £822m overspend for the previous financial year – and more than 20 times the £115m of 2013 to 2014.

While the budget deficit is vast, it is not as bad as predicted because the Department of Health warned hospitals to control their spending earlier this year – but it will cause longer waiting times and poorer care.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Most of the problem lies with the hospitals and NHS Providers, which represents trusts, said today the situation was "simply not sustainable".

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, told the BBC: "We have to rapidly regain control of NHS finances, otherwise we risk lengthening waiting times for patients, limiting their access to wider services and other reductions in the quality of patient care."

The overspend has been caused by increasing demand on the service as the aging population expands and high spending on agency staff, as well as other factors, says the regulator NHS Improvement.

Overall, 65 per cent of NHS trusts in England are in overspend deficit, among them nearly all hospitals. Figures for the rest of the UK are not available.

"Hospitals … are not like businesses," says the BBC's health correspondent, Nick Triggle. "They're not going to just go bust, as the government can always step in."

But the impact of the overspend will be felt as hospitals are told by the Department of Health to make up the deficit from their budgets for this year, adds Triggle.

The deficit is a "major embarrassment" for the Government, insists The Guardian, because the Treasury told the NHS to make sure it was no more than £1.8bn. The overspend will "wreck this year's financial planning", it adds.

Some experts have accused the NHS of using "accounting tricks" to make the deficit seem less, says the paper, and say its true scale is "much worse".