Patients living in the country get a raw deal from the NHS, study finds
Really pleased to see the campaigning work of the new National Centre for Rural Health and Care achieving some national profile. This story tells us:
Professor John Appleby, the Nuffield Trust’s chief economist and director of research, said: “The evidence is mounting that small and remote hospitals face higher costs that they cannot avoid, with comparatively poor performance against key NHS measures and dire financial positions.
“It is certainly worrying that the methods used to allocate funding to these hospitals are inconsistent, obscure and depend so heavily on judgment. We recommend that the true scale of costs is examined again, and that national bodies are much clearer about how they make their funding decisions.”
Jan Sobieraj, chief executive of the National Centre for Rural Health and Care, said: “This report is showing us that there is growing evidence that rural healthcare is not properly funded.”
“The choice that trusts in these areas have is to either have a deficit, or find themselves in danger of not having enough resources to cover the service.”
The report said efforts to adjust funding to recognise unavoidable differences in the cost of land, buildings and labour have been in place since the early 1980’s but tended to work to the advantage of urban areas.
And it said attempts to give small uplifts to some remote areas had been allocated in an “arbitrary manner” leaving some with nothing extra.