NHS financial sustainability: evidence to Public Accounts Committee inquiry
NHS leaders welcomed the National Audit Office report into NHS Financial Management and Sustainability published in July 2024, which echoed many of the issues they have been raising with us as their membership body for a number of years.
In particular, our members were pleased to see the emphasis the report put on the need to shift to longer-term funding cycles, which has been a key frustration and barrier to improving service experience and delivery over recent years. Given the ever-rising demand for NHS care, putting the NHS on a more financially sustainable footing will require a more effective approach to reducing future demand for care – particularly for most costly, later stage treatments. This will require a shift in focus to earlier, more preventative services, which is something NHS leaders have long aspired to. The government’s commitments to shift more care from hospital to community, from illness to prevention and from analogue to digital are the right way to do this.
However, realising this ambition will require a new approach to oversight and targets, sustained capital investment, new routes for private investment in estate and new mechanisms for paying for care services to encourage those services to integrate. In addition to longer-term cycles, funding cycles should be better aligned across Whitehall to enable better integration of health, care, housing and return-to-work services so departments can collectively deliver better value.
