Father Jack wrote:
Not doubting your figures but would the A&E staff not be there anyway (waiting round for car crash/emergency victims etc etc)?
And being as they would be there anyway, they are still costing the same money, regardless of if they pull a splinter out of your finger (or other parts of your anatomy) or just sit around twiddling their thumbs?
(and the same for GP's as well?)
It doesn't really work that way when it comes to paying. The NHS commissioners pay the A&E service £x to provide the staffing and facilities (the overheads) which comes with a long contract list of KPIs. The same works for GPs as well. Every possible injury or illness is given a national code, and no matter where you are in the country there is a cost allocated to that code type. So for example if you go into A&E with a heart attack it costs more than if you go in with a splinter. You have to then imagine A&E and GPs to almost be a private business, actually most GPs are private, not many are employed by the NHS. They then invoice the commissioners for the number of people seen according to the code type. What people don't realise is if you fill up a GPs or A&E waiting lists with splinters and colds, they exceed the population quota given to them by the commissioners, therefore they can demand more money, to employ more staff to cope with the increase in demand.
At the moment it is the commissioners who decide where the money is spent and how. So when you have serious cases for treatment such as IVF, plastic surgery, treatment for cancer etc etc, the commissioners will decide case on case whether the patients will get that treatment. What the government want to do is give this commissioner power to the GPs, so not only will your medicaly trained GP have to give you clinical service, they also need to be a business / accountancy firm. There are a trillion ways the NHS can save money, and handing the control to GPs isn't one of them, hence why the government have held of the plans to make the change.