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NHS to require extra £50bn a year by 2030, warns Lord Darzi

The NHS is due to require an extra £50bn a year by 2030 in order to meet demand, Professor Lord Ara Darzi has said.

His report on health and care added that, in addition to this, adult social care would require an extra £10bn a year ‘as a minimum’.

In response, he warned that governments must ‘stop approaching the NHS and social care as a liability to be managed and instead look at it as investment that delivers a return’.

The report, which comes as Prime Minister Theresa May has announced she is looking at a longer term, ‘multiyear’ NHS funding settlement, said that to ‘put the NHS back on its long-run funding trajectory and fill the social care funding gap’ it would require ‘an extra £50bn for the NHS and £10bn on social care in tax contribution per year by 2030’.

Lord Darzi said: ‘While the prospect of a long-term funding settlement is welcome, it is vital that it delivers enough money to meet the demands of the decade ahead.’

He added that ‘funding the NHS, while social care falls over is not an option’.

BMA chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul said that ‘with funding lagging behind that of other comparable European countries, we need the government to provide concrete details and ensure that resources are made available urgently’.

Meanwhile, the King’s Fund published a warning over the NHS’s rising drugs spend, which it said could lead to declined patient access to drugs.

The think tank’s analysis revealed NHS medicines spend has grown by 5% annually (£4bn) since 2010/11, in comparison to overall NHS funding growth of just 1%.

The King’s Fund said hospital consultants were behind the lion share of the increased spend, due to rising patient numbers and ‘expensive’ new treatments, such as cancer and auto-immune condition drugs.

Senior policy adviser Helen McKenna said this had led to policy makers resorting to ‘increasingly controversial measures’ to reduce inappropriate prescribing, prompting concern about ‘the erosion of patients’ access to medicines’.

Pulse has previously reported on prescribing incentive schemes under which GPs were offered a share of savings made a result of reducing prescribing costs.


          

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