NHS and department of health officials show a “lack of ideas or drive” to transform the health service for patients, MPs have said.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has published a report into the future of the health service months after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer laid out plans for “three big shifts” in the NHS.
They were moving from hospital-based to community care; from analogue to digital; and from treating ill health to preventing people getting sick in the first place.
However, the PAC said that, under questioning, officials from both the department of health and NHS England do not seem ready to take that on.
The cross-party committee of MPs therefore added that the government’s NHS ambitions seem to “run counter to officials’ lack of ideas or drive to change”.
The PAC also accused NHS England of being “overly optimistic” regarding improving productivity in the NHS, adding that the financial position of the health service overall continues to worsen.
In its report published today, PAC says its findings show NHS England’s “long-held” ambition to move more care from hospitals to the community “has stalled”.
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Furthermore, despite carrying out 15% more planned activity compared with before the pandemic, the NHS is less productive overall once the activities of mental health trusts, community trusts and GPs are considered.
The report said: “NHS England displays a remarkable complacency about the realisation of future NHS productivity improvements, which, if achieved, would be unprecedented.
“According to official ONS (Office for National Statistics) measures, long-term productivity gains in the NHS averaged 0.6% a year over the period 1996-97 to 2018-19. But productivity subsequently fell and has yet to recover fully.”
The report also said that “the switch to digital in parts of the NHS has been glacially slow”.
Money intended for technology has had to be redirected to plug spending deficits elsewhere.
The report noted that some NHS trusts still rely on fax machines, while others “are often still too reliant on paper records”.
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This is despite the fact that hospitals with electronic patient records have productivity levels that are 13% higher than those without.
In the study, the MPs argued the department of health and NHS England’s approach to NHS finances “is typified by short-termism”.
The report also condemned officials for repeatedly failing to provide information about budgets in good time to local NHS systems, saying there was “disregard for basic principles of sound financial planning”.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Conservative MP and chairman of the PAC, said: “The current government has told the public that the NHS is broken.
“This will not come as news to NHS patients, nor to its hard-working staff across the country.
“Nor indeed does it to this committee, which has long warned of the systemic issues plaguing the NHS, issues which the government has transformative ambitions to address.
“We were aghast then, to find amongst senior officials in charge of delivering these ambitions some of the worst complacency displayed to the PAC in my time serving on it.”
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An NHS England spokesman said: “The report from the PAC contains basic factual inaccuracies and a flawed understanding of how the NHS and the government’s financial processes work.
“While NHS productivity is now improving at double pre-pandemic levels, far from being complacent, NHS England has repeatedly been open about the problem and the actions being taken to address it, including in the December public board meeting, and we will be publishing further improvement measures later this week in planning guidance.
“Reform is part of the NHS’s DNA and has ensured performance improvements for patients in the past year, including innovations such as virtual wards – despite the huge challenges the NHS has faced, including capital starvation, unprecedented strikes and a fragile social care sector.”
