Medical training and public health budgets will be cut, Osborne confirms

The UK chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, has confirmed that budgets for medical training and public health will be cut, to help fund increases to the core NHS budget for the next five years.

The Treasury’s spending review outlines that the NHS in England will receive £10bn (€14bn; $15bn) more in real terms by 2020-21 than in 2014-15, with £6bn available by next year.1 This will raise NHS England’s budget to £101bn next year and to £120bn by 2020-21.

But, as experts forecasted ahead of the statement,2 the Department of Health’s wider budget, which pays for areas such as training, public health, and regulation, will be cut by 25%, which would currently amount to a loss of £1.5bn in funding a year.

Although the spending review was short on details of how these cuts would be implemented, it said that funding to local governments for public health would be …