NHS cuts ‘detrimental to patient care’

The chairman of the British Medical Association has said that a budgetary straight jacket is leading to job losses, recruitment freezes and inadequate care for patients in the NHS.

Dr Mark Porter said 20 billion pounds worth of "efficiency gains" had come at a time of increasing demand for healthcare services and subsequently are having a detrimental effect.

He told the Guardian: "The key thing to remember is that there's effectively a policy that results in redundancies because the single most important policy determinant in the NHS is the spending limits on it imposed by the government."

Dr Porter was speaking after a freedom of information request made to the Department of Health revealed 4,620 frontline staff were made compulsorily redundant between 2010-11 and 2012-13, while a further 2,430 NHS employees took voluntary redundancy. 

From April 2014, all trusts will be required to publish how many nurses they have in each ward, so patients can see if new guidelines on minimum staffing levels have been meet.