I came across some interesting snapshot facts yesterday about how our NHS has grown over the years. Last year we spent £140 billion on the NHS – more than 10 times than was spent on it 60 years ago after taking into account inflation. Employing a staff of 1.7 million it is the fifth biggest employer in the entire World. As the years have passed successive governments of all colours have had to spend more and more as new treatments are discovered, the population grows, lives longer and demand increases. Presently some 30% of our public spending is devoted to the NHS. Even in this Parliament when the government is trying to control public expenditure £8 billion more a year is being committed to the NHS. It treats 1 million patients a day.
David Nuttall 
My neighbour, a distinctly non-PC Bury lady, is very bullish about the future of the NHS following Brexit.
She is certain that –
1. The NHS will have an extra £350m funding each week
2. With net immigration below 100000 per annum the demand on its services from ‘foreigners’ will reduce
3. With a reduction in pesky EU red-tape it will be much more efficient. Examples she mentions include the repeal of the Working Hours Directive, so that doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers can be made to work longer, less interference with the regulation of new drugs, so they can be made more cheaply, and more local purchasing so that new equipment is made in Britain, and therefore better and cheaper
4. Fewer foreign workers and more home grown, better trained more efficient specialists, carers and cleaners
5. With the revival of our manufacturing industry and more exports to Australia and New Zealand our economy will be stronger, more taxes will be collected, austerity will end and in a resultant period of plenty even more money will be available to pay for proper hospitals and surgeries. She fully expects a rash of ‘Brexit dividend’ named facilities all around the country.
I have tried to tell her that things might not quite turn out like this – but she tells me that Boris and Gove explained all this quite clearly last year so it must be true. She really admires Trump.
I look out of my window and see where several millions have been spent due to NHS negligence. No one lost their job over this occurrence, people where sorry, lessons learn’t (HA) but I’d advocate it is one small area which costs us taxpayers multiple millions, notwithstanding it leaves less money for necessary operations. It makes me weep (metaphorically) – ahh well. Spend some more – NO
However you wish to massage the statistics, the obvious fact is that Jeremy Hunt is destroying the NHS. If funding were so good and staff levels so high, why would so many highly trained people be leaving the NHS – and often the country? Morale is as low as it can get and we will soon be in a position where our hospitals will be staffed entirely by foreign workers, as all the British doctors and nurses will have emigrated, retired or left the profession. This is dire. Please make a fuss before it’s too late.
It is easy to complain that the government and argue that the government should be spending even more on the NHS. How much more? How many more people should be employed. For those who are opposed to the Conservatives it is an inconvenient truth that more is being spent on the NHS than at any time in our history. It is simply not the case that the NHS Is being destroyed.
If a government inherits a service that is appropriately funded and then chooses to increase the budget of that service by £1 per year, year-on-year, the government can factually claim to be increasing the budget of the service. The fact that inflation is not addressed by that £1 increase is ignored and the budget is, therefore, massively reduced year-on-year. Of course, I have exaggerated for effect to illustrate the point but the fact that uplifts to the NHS budget under this government (and the Conservative-led coalition) have been sub-inflation and have resulted in a steady reduction in NHS budget in cash terms – i.e. actual spending power – over that period. That is surely “the inconvenient truth” here?
What do you think about the proposed re-configuration of Bury’s own urgent care plan?
In brief I met with the CCG before the proposals were made public and I was satisfied they had good grounds supported by the Clinical Director for what they wanted to do. I knew it would be opposed but as always I do what I believe to be right. In any event the plans are presently on hold.
Thanks for your response.
I think the question is what it’s spent on, Certainly not wages. There are a lot of managers and advisors, plus private companies cashing in
HMM. That’s 140,000,000,000,000 pounds (look at all those tax payers zero’s, be joyous if you pay no tax) LOOK at it. WOW. Logic suggests that a small percentage must be wasted. Wanna guess anyone what that percentage is? Tother thing is according to Mr Corbyn 50,000 European workers work in it, hang on even 10% of 1.7 million is 170,000. Time some where someone took a grown up look at this money wasting behemoth.