Spending on healthcare must slow because of the stalling economy, a leading health policy expert has warned.
UK spending on health care spending is growing 2% points faster than gross domestic product (GDP)and this is unsustainable in an era of low growth when the government says it has reached the limits of taxable capacity, Professor Nick Bosanquet from Imperial College, London wrote this week in the BMJ.
He said the challenge was to achieve greater value for money from the vast sums of money already spent on health services rather than increasing spending. "There will be no incentive to invest in a new kind of health service while the easy option of continued growth in high spending in the old one remains," he added.
Decisions on health spending should be made on the basis of value, and priority must be given to raising value from the pound, he explained. From 1990–8 the return on health expenditure was 148% in the UK— so for every pound spent, there were £2.48 worth of health gain.
He pointed out that many of the most effective health interventions are low cost, such as the recent cancer reform strategy which increased investment in prevention, part financed by reduced hospital admissions, and the national service frameworks for coronary heart disease and diabetes, which identify and treat patients at high risk of vision loss.
Increasing efficiency may be the only way of reconciling rising demands for health services, such as those of the ageing population, with public finance constraint, and the challenge for the next five years will be to redesign more effective services for the future, he concluded.