Posts Tagged foundation trusts
How Hospitals Can Survive the Budgets Cuts
Posted by Laura Brereton in Health on 10/08/2009
England’s 115 foundation trust hospitals have been told by Monitor, the organisation responsible for their regulation, that the three-year budget forecasts they submitted are overly optimistic, considering the NHS’s tightened funding in the coming years. They have now been given until the end of September to re-submit their financial plans. Read the rest of this entry »
Foundation Trusts: the way forward
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 25/10/2007
This Monday, Robert Naylor, Chief Executive of UCLH NHS Foundation Trust, gave a seminar at Civitas, in which he put a powerful case for the continuation and deepening of the Foundation Trust ‘experiment’. He argued persuasively that not only has Foundation Trust status – with its associated financial and structural freedoms – provided for both greater efficiency in use of resources, but also higher quality and more responsive care for patients. In short, it is the way forward for the secondary care sector. His presentation can be viewed here.
Don’t be fooled by the surplus…
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 07/06/2007
We can all cheer! The NHS is in surplus. Unaudited accounts released yesterday by the DoH reveal an operating surplus of £510m, a miraculous £1.37bn turnaround from the £547m deficit reported last year. Most of the press have, typically, attacked this achievement by reporting the dire consequences – as many as 70,000 job cuts, cut-backs back on elective surgery, cuts to the NHS training budget etc. But the fact is the problem of NHS deficits had to be addressed. The NHS, so long as it has finite resources by virtue of the fact is funded through general taxation, must also have a centrally agreed budget and a principle of cost containment, i.e. that its organisations either stay in surplus or balance.
The real issue is why such deficits have mounted in the first place. This is no easy question to answer, but the root cause almost certainly lies in the structure of the NHS itself.