The NHS’s deficit in England soared to £1.6bn in the first half of this year, almost double the £930m overspend it recorded in the first three months, new official figures reveal.
The service’s finances sank even further into the red over the summer as hospitals had to hire extra staff to maintain quality of care and deal with both rising demand from patients and large numbers of patients who could not be discharged from hospital because of inadequate social care.
That was £358m worse than expected and was partly because hospitals’ increasing difficulty in recruiting enough staff forced them to spend £900m more than planned on agency staff.
The grim picture – unprecedented in the NHS’s history – is detailed in the latest data on NHS financial performance, which has just been published by Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority, the bodies which oversee NHS foundation trusts and non-foundation trusts respectively.
Many hospitals which had previously posted surpluses sank into deficit, the figures show.
Based on current performance, the NHS’s English trusts are predicting they will end the year £2.2bn in deficit, with 156 out of 239 of them recording deficits, Monitor said.
The two regulators highlighted the damaging effect that hospitals’ inability to discharge patients who doctors believe are fit to leave – delayed discharges – was having on them delivering key NHS waiting times.
“In particular, delayed transfers of care – where medically fit patients cannot leave hospital because the care they need is not yet in place – are having a negative impact on NHS organisations meeting other standards, especially in A&E, while spending on agency staff is continuing to have an extremely detrimental effect on their financial position,” they said.
The data revealed that:
- Overall, the NHS provider sector reported a year-to-date deficit of £1.6bn – £358m worse than planned at the start of 2015-16.
- Delayed discharges are estimated to have cost NHS providers £270m over the first six months of this financial year.
- NHS care providers spent £1.8bn on contract and agency staff – almost double what they planned.
