Exclusive: NHS faces financial disaster in 2015 as politicians urged to find radical solution
This is grave and serious stuff – we have nowhere near enough community engagement in these issues from my perspective. This article tells us:
The NHS faces a “financial crisis” next year as a budget freeze imposed by the Coalition risks pushing most hospital trusts into deficit, a leading think-tank has warned.
In a grim message to all three major parties, the King’s Fund said that whoever wins next May’s general election will need to find more funding for the NHS or face up to the reality of “significant cuts to services”.
The future of the health service is at risk unless politicians come up with radical solutions to the crisis in the coming months, it warns.
In its quarterly monitoring report, the health policy think-tank said it had encountered deep and widespread gloom among finance directors of NHS hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups in England.
Two-thirds of NHS trust finance directors were concerned that their hospital would go into deficit in 2015-16. Another 20 per cent said they were uncertain about the future, leaving a small minority confident that they could balance the books.