Doesn\’t look good, does it?
Official figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics show that the amount of treatment the NHS delivers is lagging behind the pace of increase in the service\’s budget.
Critics said the statistics showed the NHS had absorbed huge amounts of money with very little to show for it and the Government must reform its management instead of pumping in ever more funding.
NHS productivity fell by 2.0 per cent a year between 2001 and 2005, according to the Centre for the Measurement of Government Activity, the ONS unit that monitors public spending. That was the period of the biggest funding increase in NHS history.
And the defence is?
all NHS staff have enjoyed well deserved pay rises.
Well, yes, rather the point that\’s being made. We\’re now paying people more than we used to to do the same thing. So productivity, measured as the amount of money we spend for a specific output, has fallen.
That\’s not so much a defence or an explanation as a confirmation.
Well yes – but if you believe NHS staff were underpaid before (and given the monopsonistic nature of the market for healthcare types in the UK, that’s entirely possible) then the current dynamic is more appropriate.
Hard to say whether a different system would deliver better results (productivity in US healthcare has declined every years since 1980 or something like that).
It still implies the NHS’s output is something like 40% higher/better than it was ten years ago (for 50% more spending).
Well we’re all underpaid – I know I am. But the usual line is that nurses (or doctors, or tinkers or tailors) are so underpaid that is has affected their morale and thus productivity.
A pay-rise is meant to rectify that and pay for itself by reinvigorating the workforce, isn’t it?