Health service leaders have warned ministers that the NHS in England cannot continue to bear the strain of supporting a social care system that needs urgent reconfiguration and better long term funding.

The NHS Confederation said that there was a £2bn (€2.5bn; $3.2bn) funding shortfall in social care and that temporary transfers of funds from the NHS to plug the gap were “unsustainable.”

In a report published on Monday 24 September, the confederation, the membership body for all organisations that commission and provide NHS services, said that NHS organisations were already struggling to find efficiency savings of £4bn to £5bn a year and could not find a further £2bn a year “without severely affecting patient care.”1

Its policy director, Jo Webber, said, “The health service cannot …