Health check Pouring more money into NHS does not work - minister

ILLIONS of pounds of extra funding has been pumped into the NHS by successive governments without seeing an improvement in the standards of service, so the Labour government is going to try to improve the NHS by cutting budgets and making it work better.

- Staff REPORTER

That’s the view of South Bristol MP and health minister Karin Smyth, who said the way to improve the NHS was getting it to work smarter.

Ms Smyth, who was an NHS manager in Bristol before she was first elected to Parliament ten years ago, backed the imminent merger of the two big Bristol NHS trusts, and defended the decision by her department to cut five per cent from each of their total budgets.

Both the University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW) and North Bristol NHS Trust said earlier this year the budget cuts would mean hundreds of jobs being lost, or vacancies not filled, at a time when young doctors and nurses are complaining that they are being trained but there are no jobs for them to go into.

Organisations representing doctors and nurses said the job and budget cuts come at a time when the pressures on staff were already too much.

But Ms Smyth, who is the minister for health in the Department of Health and second to secretary of state Wes Streeting, said pumping more money into the NHS had not worked in the past.

So she said that is why, after being an opposition health spokesperson for the first nine years of her time in Parliament, and having been among those in charge of the NHS for just over a year, things would change.

“The amount of money that has been given into the NHS over a long period of time is massive,” she told the Post.