Seven days in medicine: 21-27 March 2018
BMJ 2018; 360 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k1393 (Published 29 March 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;360:k1393
NHS funding
Hunt wants 10 year NHS funding deal
England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, called for a 10 year funding deal for the NHS amid speculation that the government could make more money available. A full departmental spending review is due next year, but he told ITV’s Peston on Sunday that healthcare needs a 10 year settlement to allow proper planning to cope with an ageing UK population. Speculation that Prime Minister Theresa May plans to announce an extra £4bn (€4.56bn; $5.62bn) a year for the NHS for the next 10 years, to coincide with the NHS’s 70th anniversary in July, was “premature,” said Hunt, who believed that the public “would be prepared to see some of their own taxes going into the NHS, but they are very clear they want to know that money is actually going into the NHS and social care system.”
Tax must rise to fund NHS, say senior MPs
A cross party group of senior MPs wrote to Theresa May urging her to set up a “parliamentary commission” to look at funding of the NHS, social care, and public health. The letter, signed by 98 MPs including 21 select committee chairs, said that this would effectively be a special select committee and could examine witnesses and make recommendations by Easter 2019. “Without action patients will experience a serious further decline in services and the blame will be laid squarely at the door of politicians,” it said.
GP pensions
BMA requests information on failures
The BMA used a freedom of information request to ask NHS England about GPs’ pension contributions after ongoing failures at Primary Care Support England (PCSE), run by Capita. It asked for the value and whereabouts of unallocated money, the absence of bank details for online transfers, out of date GP pension records, …
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