Elderly causing NHS to overspend say health chiefs

This article is from the Evesham Journal, Worcestershire, England.

England has had the National Health Service, aka Socialized medicine, for 50 years. You'd think they'd be experts at it by now. But those pesky old folks are being a drain on resources.

Elderly causing NHS to overspend say health chiefs
ELDERLY people are placing growing pressure on the NHS and health bosses have said they expect to go millions of pounds over budget to provide for their care.

During a meeting of NHS Worcestershire last week health chiefs revealed they had budgeted £17.3 million for continuing healthcare in Worcestershire in 2011/12, but projected to go £3.1 million over budget at the current rate of spending.

The bulk of the costs arise from caring for the elderly. The breakdown of the budget shows £4.83 million is spent on older people’s needs and £5 million on the elderly mentally ill, such as dementia care.

However the costs are not exclusively incurred by the elderly – £2.66 million has been set aside for young people who are physically disabled and £2.45 million to support people with learning disabilities.

Tony Hadfield, a non-executive director, said: “We have significantly increased this budget and we are talking about a significant overspend here. Have you looked behind the figures to see what is driving this very rapid increase?”

Finance director Brian Hanford said the increase was partly to do with new national benchmarking and the Trust had been previously below the national average in providing continuing healthcare.

He also said there had been more nursing homes and residential homes in the shire counties generally and that part of the costs have been attributed to increased spending on equipment like ventilators for the disabled.

Karen Hunter, head of quality and patient safety, added that there had also been an increase in what she described as “high demand patients” who require significant additional financial support.

Chief executive Eamonn Kelly said: “We would expect to see in the NHS continuing growth in costs in this area.”



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