NHS told to cut spending on doctors and nurses to save £4.5bn

Hospitals are preparing to cut spending on doctors and nurses by hundreds of millions of pounds after being ordered to plug a £4.5 billion hole in the NHS budget.

Chief executives at hospitals, mental health trusts and community services in England have been ordered to review staffing levels and draw up plans to close some services and merge others. They are also looking at banning or restricting the use of some agency workers.

NHS bosses have been alerted in recent days to the scale of the cuts needed after negotiating financial plans for next year. The health service in England has a budget of £165 billion for the 2024-25 financial year, which starts next week. The budget rose by 3.2% in real terms between 2018-19 and 2023-24.

Spending has been put under additional pressure by the cost of covering strikes by junior doctors which NHS England has said has cost more than £1.5 billion and affected more than 430,000 patients’ appointments.

Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said services had been stretched by the need to pick up the pieces from a shortage of social care and other community services. She said an ageing population and poor public health meant patients in hospital were sicker and staying longer, needing more care.

She said: “Trust leaders are being pushed to the very limits of what is possible, and there will be a situation where they have to make difficult choices about keeping basic services going versus investing in quality and improvement for the future. We are in a situation where we will be patching something that’s already a bit patched-together.”

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Source: Times, 31 March 2024