Health and social care services across England have paid £21m to management consultant firms to advise on radical cost-cutting plans, an investigation has revealed.
The Pulse investigation of all 44 ‘Sustainability and Transformation Partnership’ (STP) regions found that some areas have spent millions of pounds on private consultants to help them draw up the plans, which in some cases involve cutting frontline services such as nurses.
The controversial plans were first announced in December 2015, with the aim of making £22bn worth of efficiency savings to the health services by 2020/21. The Pulse investigation reveals that they were often heavily reliant on outside consultants, costing millions of pounds
The 19 STPs that responded to the FOI request said they had spent £9.17m on consultants since March 2016, when they started working on the plans. Extrapolated across the 44 STP areas in England, this comes to £21.2m.
The plans that were available in January this year for eleven of the 44 STPs showed a planned reduction of 1.6% in the total workforce, including a 2.3% cut in nursing, midwifery and health visiting staff.
One STP, Kent and Medway said it had paid £3.2m to four firms, including £2.97m to Carnall Farrar for ‘strategy, analytics, modelling and programme management’.
In response, Kent and Medway STP said: ‘We are extremely cost-conscious and have invested only where it has been absolutely necessary to provide capacity, skills, experience and expertise that have not been available, or able to be freed up, within Kent and Medway health and social care organisations.’
‘Struggle to justify spending’
Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: ‘The Government will struggle to justify this level of spending on management consultants who advise on cutting nursing staff.
‘This sort of expertise should already be held within the NHS. It is a false economy when the consultants cost more than the savings they identify.
Full story in Nursing in Practice, 30 August 2017