Despite David Cameron’s constant assertions that NHS spending would be protected and even go up under his Government, the reality is that the NHS is facing huge reductions in its spending which are going to affect frontline services. The Leicester NHS Chief Executive, Malcolm Lowe-Lauri, has stated the following

“More than 60% of our costs are locked up in people.

You cannot get away with dealing with the Nicholson challenge without significantly reducing the number of people employed in the health service.

That may not be seen as good news – and nobody likes doing it – but that is the reality.

The challenge is to do that in a civilised and effective way, but recognising that over five years there will be many posts that will go.”

Leicester University Hospitals are facing the prospect of having to reduce spending by £158m over the next 5 years. Leicester is already a place where people die earlier than the national average and can ill afford cuts which affect people’s health outcomes. This is even before the Tory plans of drastically reorganising the NHS and spending billions of pounds trying to introduce more competition in to the NHS.

You can read the full BBC News article here.

Tags: Leicester, NHS

This entry was posted on June 18, 2011 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Health, NHS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.