Health Foundation March 2017
- This report analyses the commissioning budget and finances of the NHS, NHS providers performance and the consultant productivity based on hospital activity at the provider level. It draws on their accounts from 2009/10 to 2015/16 and linking this to wider NHS data.
- The analyses show that NHS providers saw relatively little of the income growth for the NHS as a whole, and that productivity for consultants and the wider workforce in acute hospitals has been falling.
- Predictors of consultant productivity were found to include skill mix, hospital characteristics and regional variation.
- Conclusions
- "The last six years have seen big changes in the composition of the NHS workforce – fast growth in consultant numbers but little growth in nurses. Meanwhile, productivity for consultants and the wider workforce in acute hospitals has been falling. This does not mean that staff are not working incredibly hard – they are. But people work in teams and in systems. No matter how hard people work, if they are not supported properly by these systems they will not be as productive as they could be, which is bad for finances and bad for staff morale. There may be good reasons for the growth in numbers of consultants, but the NHS is not using their skills well – as the fall in consultant productivity shows."
