In this article, Dr Barend ter Haar - chair of the BES Corporate group of companies – gives his thoughts on the Lord Carter Review and offers advice on where hospitals can make savings.
Lord Carter in his Review published in 20161 indicated that “the biggest challenge to the NHS was the requirement to make financial savings, from efficiencies, of two to three per cent a year i.e. 10-15% between 2016 and 2021”. He established that “reducing unwarranted variations could provide nine per cent of this saving: £5 billion a year of the acute hospital budget of £55.6 billion a year – representing about 50% of the total health budget”. Lord Carter analysed the financial performance of a range of Trusts across a number of areas, and his thesis is that if the worse performing 50% improved their performance to just the median value, most of the targeted savings would be achieved.
In this article I look at places where Lord Carter established the savings that could be made, and offer some available tools to this end. I also consider how the patient experience can be improved at the same time. Prior to the Carter review, the 2012 King’s Fund report2 had already described four themes which needed to be addressed:
Applying business principles to the NHS
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