Posts Tagged ‘Service improvement’

The leaking of the McKinsey Report on how to save money in the NHS to Health Service Journal seems finally to have kick-started a debate on whether, and how, health spending might be restrained. However it is interesting that the debate so far has been among professionals and experts such as the Kings Fund. The opposition moved quickly to paint the report as showing the government’s “true intentions” towards the NHS, contrasted with their own commitment to real terms spending increases (a case of the “biter bit” if ever there was one); meanwhile the government immediately said that it had “no plans to adopt these proposals in the future”, effectively rejecting the findings of a report which it had commissioned!

So more of the same so far: both sides falling over themselves to pledge support to the NHS, putting undue faith in yet more efficiency savings and ignoring (at least in public) the real challenges which the NHS and wider health spending will face in the next decade and beyond. Meanwhile some of the ideas in the McKinsey report have real merit and others are statements of the blindingly obvious, and all certainly merit sensible discussion.

We’ll provide further and fuller views on what might be the future for the NHS in a fuller commentary in a few days time – watch this space.