New health announcements for England include funding for new buildings, sorting out doctors’ pension tax issues and a new artificial intelligence lab.
New prime minister, Boris Johnson, has made it his aim to reduce waiting times to see GPs and in A&E units. New figures show that 2.27 million people entered A&E units in England in July – a 4% increase from July 2018, and there were around 554,000 emergency admissions. This is not the only department with long waiting lists – over 600,000 people have been waiting over 18-weeks (NHS target) for routine operations and procedures.
Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock insist that the £1.8 billion being injected into the NHS is ‘new’ money, but much of this is actually built from surpluses in hospitals that they were not allowed to spend previously. Sally Gainsbury at Nuffield Trust was the first analyst to point out this problem and said that “to claim this as new money is a little like finally giving back the £10 you borrowed some time ago – and expecting to be applauded wildly”.
Full story in BBC News, 10 August 2019