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July 01, 2004
How much should we spend on the NHS? Issues and challenges arising from the Wanless Review of future health care spending
Editors: John Appleby, Nancy Devlin, Diane Dawson
ISBN: 1 899040 87 0
Publisher: Office for Health Economics, King's Fund, York University Centre for Health Economics
Price: £12.50
The Wanless Report "Securing Our Future Health" published in 2002 was ground-breaking. It recommended unprecedented spending increases for the NHS of around 7.5% annually in real terms over the next five years. So far, in each subsequent budget the Chancellor has followed these recommendations.
"Securing Our Future Health" is based on some key assumptions, namely that the government can manage the UK's demand for health care encouraging the public to take an active role in preventing ill health; that healthy lifestyles will lead to an overall reduction in the demand for NHS services; productivity in the NHS can improve by 2.5% per annum, and population ageing will primarily affect health care spending at the end of life.
This monograph challenges these and other underlying assumptions, and questions how we can measure progress, and how critical these are to future spending projections. Notably it asks when the models developed by Wanless and his team will be open to public scrutiny, as they are for instance in the US, given its use by government to guide health care expenditure in this country and that Wanless suggested this review exercise be repeated regularly to update and refine the assumptions and knowledge underpinning the spending review.
To order got to OHE
