Productivity in NHS has been seriously neglected, meeting hears

Consultants in the United Kingdom are among the best paid and least productive in Europe—a situation that is unsustainable in the current environment of financial constraints, a meeting heard this week. One way to increase productivity might be to introduce an element of performance related pay into doctors’ salaries, one commentator has suggested.

Mark Britnell, global lead on healthcare at the consultancy firm KPMG, said that the gap between the productivity of the private sector and that of the NHS is getting wider. Although most industries expect to increase their productivity by 2% a year, the productivity of the NHS has fallen by 10% over …