Five funding priorities for the NHS: briefing ahead of the 2019 Spending Round
The NHS in England received a five-year funding settlement worth £20.5 billion in April 2019.
This followed ten years of the lowest funding increases in the history of the NHS, with an average of 1.1 per cent real terms growth from 2009/10-2014/15, this new funding has provided a
much-needed boost to an over-stretched system. It will help deliver the ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan.
However, several critical areas were not covered by the settlement - and these will be crucial to determining whether the NHS is able to deliver the plan. The areas not covered included capital spending, training and education, social care and public health. The accompanying promise was that these topics would be considered as part of a Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), which was expected in autumn 2019.
This CSR has now been shelved in favour of a one-year Spending Round, which is due to be announced on 4 September 2019. Ahead of this announcement, the NHS Confederation has published this briefing, which sets out what we believe to be the key remaining funding priorities for the NHS.
