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Strike action and a crisis in social care have left thousands more people trapped in hospital beds with nowhere to go, while other patients struggle to access care, making funding increases meaningless and NHS staff, it is reported.
A damning internal NHS performance review carried out last year reportedly revealed that despite a £20 billion increase in funding since 2018 and 15% more doctors and nurses on the NHS payroll, the health service was carrying out just a little more routine treatments than it was before covid.
Julian Kelly, NHS chief financial officer, said productivity was “still lower than it was before the pandemic”, with staff struggling to discharge patients and unable to cope with delays to procedures and appointments caused by striking staff of the NHS, the Times reports.
About a third of that drop in productivity stems from statistics that don’t reflect improvements such as an increase in the number of patients sent home the same day, the paper said. Yet hospitals are still 11% less productive than before Covid, the review concluded, and the number of people in hospital for more than three weeks has risen by 15% on pre-Covid levels.
The increase in staff numbers masks the true picture of what is happening to hospital staffing levels. Although the number of inexperienced junior staff has increased, older, more knowledgeable nurses and doctors have left the NHS.
Last July, the Guardian revealed a growing exodus of highly experienced doctors and surgeons from the NHS to foreign health systemsincluding Ireland, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, where they can double their salary and enjoy better working conditions.
NHS chiefs suspect this has hurt productivity and are reportedly planning a training and management “blitz” to help improve the situation. They also promise a host of other improvements, including upgrading computer systems.
In March, a damning report by MPs found that the government had brought England’s elderly care ‘to its knees’ with years of uneven funding and a “woefully inadequate plan” to fill thousands of vacancies.
A General Medical Council report last year warned that a growing number of doctors are planning to leave the profession this year due to burnout and frustration.
Leila McKay, of the NHS Confederation, said: “Health leaders recognize that they have an important role to play in making the most of the resources available to them”, adding that “clearly the NHS needs to make more progress”. However, she said improving productivity “will always be a challenge if the government does not recognize the scale of the population’s health problems”.
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