Govt advised to cut 137,000 NHS jobs

Thursday, 3 September 2009 5:19 PM

By Liz Stephens

A confidential report for the Department of Health has advised swingeing cuts to the NHS to meet the government's efficiency targets.

The details of the report by consultancy firm McKinsey and Company, which were revealed today by Health Service Journal include a recommendation to shed ten per cent of the workforce.

It recommends slashing the workforce by 137,000 to achieve planned £20 billion efficiency savings by 2014.

Health minister Mike O'Brien denied that the government was planning to institute the proposals made by the consultancy: "The McKinsey work. is not in any sense an NHS plan of action. They are just making some suggestions which will be looked at."

However, the proposals contained within the report to cut clinical as well as administrative staffing have already attracted heavy criticism from the main opposition parties.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "Yet again Labour ministers are failing to be straight with the British people.

"Andy Burnham promised to protect the NHS, but now we find out that his department has been drawing up secret plans for swingeing cuts.

"After years of declining productivity, this report shows that Labour still doesn't get it."

Meanwhile Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "The huge gap between what ministers say in public and the secret reports being circulated in Whitehall is becoming clearer by the day.

"While this report demonstrates the scope for efficiency savings, cutting frontline services without addressing the goliath of the NHS bureaucracy would have a disastrous impact on patient care and could destroy the service."

The report advises that the staffing cuts could be achieved by a combination of redundancies, early retirement and a cut in the number of medical school places.

NHS Confederation policy director Nigel Edwards said: "We've just spent a fortune on stopping GPs retiring. Isn't the rest of the strategy to shift care out of hospitals and into primary care?"

Other cuts recommended by the report include reductions in non-urgent surgery and selling of NHS estates.

Unions reacted angrily to the suggestions.

Karen Jennings, Unison head of health said: "The McKinsey report comes up with the same old formulaic answers and their much-repeated mantra of job cuts, as the answer to NHS savings.

"There is no room for complacency in the NHS. We must constantly look for new ways to be efficient and to deliver better patient care, but the government would be right to question the wisdom of putting these proposals into action.

"Management consultants prepare their statistics and graphs and put them into reports, without having responsibility for the consequences."

Conservative leader David Cameron was recently forced to admonish Tory MEP Daniel Hannan after his attacks on the NHS on US television led to widespread condemnation from the public.

Social networking site Twitter crashed because of the volume of 'tweets' in support of the NHS.

However, a recent poll by ComRes revealed that nearly two-thirds of Tory MPs disagree with Mr Cameron's flagship commitment to above-inflation increases in health spending.

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