The claim
“New figures show 2,500 more doctors and 2,000 fewer managers working in the NHS since the General Election.”
Conservative Party press release, February 22, 2011
Cathy Newman checks it out
Fewer bean-counters, more brain surgeons is how David Cameron might sum up his approach to the NHS. In the run-up to the election he promised that his plans to erase the deficit wouldn’t affect frontline health services. Today, figures released by the Conservative appear to show he’s delivering on his pledge. But do they stack up – or is it too early to say? The FactCheck team has been investigating.
The background
“I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”, David Cameron promised in that memorable poster campaign during the run-up to the election.
Earlier this month, Mr Cameron told MPs he was actually putting money into the NHS – but that was a claim FactCheck found to be somewhat disingenuous.
Now, the Conservatives claim that not only have they cut through Labour’s bureaucracy and managed to protect frontline NHS jobs, but they actually boosted numbers within the NHS.
Dr Daniel Poulter MP, who is serving on the Health and Social Care Bill Committee, said: “Since May, we have more doctors, nurses and midwives – and fewer managers.
“These figures expose the hysterical claims of tens of thousands of frontline job losses in the NHS for exactly what they are – pure scaremongering nonsense.”
Is he right, or is the hysteria justified?
The analysis
The Tories are on the money with the NHS figures.
We checked out the data from the NHS Information Centre and the only jobs on the frontline that have taken a hit are hospital practitioners and clinical assistants – who’ve seen their number tumble from 2,675 to 2,435.
Impressively, staff levels rose almost across the board on the NHS frontline.
The number of doctors did indeed climb – from 101,792 in May 2010 to 104,310 in November.
But that’s where the data ends: November.
The Chancellor’s Comprehensive Spending Review demanding £20bn of “efficiency savings” from the NHS was only published on 22 October.
So yes, the first six months of a coalition government did see the number of doctors, midwives, even ambulance workers, rise – as the number of NHS managers fell back by 2,103 to 28,879.
This shows that job losses – albeit in the back office – were already underway pre-Spending Review.
Just weeks after the CSR was unveiled, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that government cuts could see 27,000 nurses jobs lost.
And while it hasn’t updated its figures, the RCN said today there are “very worrying” signs ahead.
In the last two or three weeks alone, Kingston Hospital announced that almost 500 jobs are set to go in the next 5 years, while another 500 are expected to be axed at St George’s in Tooting and 630 posts are to go at Barts and the London NHS Trust, including 258 nursing posts.
And then there’s the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust – it has to make £80m of cuts and plans to kill off 600 jobs.
The RCN’s head of policy, Howard Catton, told FactCheck that this isn’t the only worry; the pipeline of nursing staff isn’t looking healthy either.
“I would not dispute the DHS topline figures on workforce but if you dig below the headline we know that since 1998 the number of Health Visitors, District Nurses and School Nurses has fallen,” he said.
In 1998, there were around 12,500 Health Visitors for example, while today there are just over 10,000.
Plus, Mr Catton said it is well known there are plans to cut student nurse places by between 10 and15 per cent over the next two to three years,.
Worse still, between 40 and 45 per cent of the Midwifery workforce will reach retirement age in the next 10 years – and more than 200,000 nurses are over 50 years of age.
Meanwhile, the McKinsey report into the impact of the NHS having to make £20bn savings estimated that 10 per cent or 120,000 jobs could ultimately be lost over a three year period.
Unison told FactCheck that employers are saying they would need to make staff redundant right across the board – not just back office workers. And in any case, the union warned, NHS employers make no distinction between back office and front line – someone who works in IT is as critical as medical staff to making operations or, indeed, a hospital, run.
Cathy Newman’s Verdict
For the Tories to crow about NHS jobs smacks rather of hubris. While it’s commendable that the number of managers has fallen since the election, the time to take stock will be after the health service has had time to implement some of the £20bn efficiency savings demanded by the chancellor. While every effort will naturally be made to protect doctors and nurses, early evidence from the unions and NHS trusts themselves suggest it will be impossible to make those kind of cuts without slicing through tens of thousands of frontline staff.
