By 2020 the NHS will have around £22bn a year less than it needs to deliver healthcare to the population in England. In addition it is estimated that the adult social care sector will have £3bn less than it needs by 2020. CHPI will continue to examine the proposed approaches to addressing these funding shortfalls, what they will mean for the quality of care and for patients being able to get treatment when it is needed.
Around 20% of all NHS expenditure now goes to non-NHS bodies to provide care. Thousands of contracts exists between the NHS and these providers in addition to the contacts which underpin the NHS internal market. CHPI has worked to examine the operation of this market and assess whether it delivers high quality care for patients and an efficient use of scarce resources.
Private hospitals are being used more and more by the NHS to perform operations. Because these hospitals are very different to NHS hospitals, CHPI has undertaken work to identify and assess the unique patient safety issues with this form of for-profit healthcare provision.
Accountability is a central principle for ensuring that provision of health and social care is effective and in line with the public interest. The past decade has seen the redrawing of many channels of accountability in the course of restructuring of health and social care provision. CHPI has worked to track and scrutinize these changes in an effort to ensure that this principle is upheld.
Social care has been subject to marketisation and privatisation for nearly 3 decades. CHPI's work has focused on the impact of this on the quality of care for mainly older people and the lessons which can be learned for wider healthcare policy.
44 Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are being implemented across the NHS in England to move a large portion of care out of hospitals into community settings, both to make them more accessible and to address a shortfall in government funding that is expected to reach £22bn by 2020. CHPI has followed this project from the start and will continue to probe its assumptions and monitor its implementation.