Ministers and NHS bosses are being urged to stop asking the health service to “deliver the impossible” of higher standards of care when it is being denied the money it needs to do its job properly. NHS Providers, whose member trusts receive £65bn of the NHS’s £100bn annual budget, says the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and the NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, are making unrealistic demands of the service. The government and our system leaders have said that the NHS still has to deliver everything that is currently being asked for,” Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, will say on Tuesday. Three-quarters (73%) of NHS trust bosses believe they do not have enough staff to function properly, according to a new NHS Providers report on the state of the NHS in England. A lack of nurses in stroke units has been shown to increase the risk of patients dying.

Source: The Guardian November 29, 2016 00:01 UTC