According to the latest quarterly monitoring report from The King’s Fund, financial confidence within the NHS is ‘ebbing away’, with a financial crisis looming in 2015/16.
One in eight Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) will overspend their budgets for the financial year just ended, based on a survey of NHS finance directors carried out for the report. Although this is an improvement on the findings from the previous quarter, it reinforces concerns that the NHS provider sector will end the year in deficit for the first time since 2006/7.
Looking ahead, only 40% of finance directors in hospitals and other providers are confident their organisation will achieve financial balance in 2014/15. This figure plunges to just 16% in 2015/16. CCG finance leads are more optimistic, although only onethird are confident of balancing the books in 2015/16.
Despite growing financial pressures, the NHS continues to hold up well against key performance indicators. The proportion of patients waiting longer than four hours in A&E stayed within the Government’s 5% target range over the quarter, although this continues to mask significant local variation – more than 60% of hospitals with major A&E units missed the target over the quarter.
Meanwhile, pressures on hospital waiting lists are growing, with more than 360,000 additional people waiting for treatment in January 2014, compared to the same month last year. Key findings from this quarter’s analysis of performance data include:
• 4.8% of patients spent four or more hours in A&E during the quarter to the end of March 2014.
• 9.6% of patients waited longer than 18 weeks for inpatient treatment in January, the highest proportion since June 2011.
• Healthcare-acquired infections remain at historically low levels with just 382 cases of C. difficile and 36 cases of MRSA reported in January 2014.
