The new government £5bn funding for the NHS announced on Monday, will only give the NHS half of what NHS leaders estimate it will need to cope with the cost of dealing with the pandemic and the record-breaking numbers waiting for treatment.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who once said the government would give the NHS whatever it needed to cope with the Covid crisis, is now reported to have told colleagues that Covid-19 handouts “can’t go on forever”.
A new joint report from the NHS bosses, A reckoning: the continuing cost of Covid-19, draws on a survey of 116 of the 213 trusts covering acute, mental health, community and ambulance services and estimates from the data provided that Covid has increased the cost of running frontline service by £4.6 bn a year.
Added to this is the cost of dealing with waiting lists that could rise to 13 million patients and the need to deal with a huge backlog in hospital maintenance.
Full story in The Lowdown, 6 September 2021