Jeremy Hunt orders hospitals to rein in spending

The NHS has been ordered by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to act on unacceptable variations in how much it spends on essential equipment – including syringes, surgical gloves and toilet rolls.

Hunt told healthcare leaders that the extra £8bn in NHS funding pledged by the government depended on the health service making £22bn of efficiency savings.

He told the 3,000 delegates at the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool that the prices different NHS bodies paid for supplies varied dramatically.

“A box of toilet rolls will cost one hospital in the NHS £66 and it will cost another hospital in the NHS £30,” he said. “Of course, this is all money that could be being spent on patient care.”

He added that there were also unacceptable variations in how much time nurses spent on admin, rather than dedicated to caring for patients.

The Labour peer Lord Carter has been leading a review of NHS procurement and will later this year publish plans for a “model hospital”, said Hunt.

Carter will set out best practice in procurement and by the end of the year will agree a figure with hospital trust bosses for how much money they will be expected to save. From January, said Hunt, “the hard bit starts” and NHS leaders will have to start making those savings.

His announcement follows this week’s call for a clampdown on spending on agency staff and echoes comments made to delegates at the conference on Wednesday by the NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, that the health service should do more to harness its collective spending power and bring down costs.

The health secretary also unveiled new measures to assess the performance of clinical commissioning groups – which commission and plan local NHS services in England.

Hunt said a proposed scorecard will rank CCGs on how well they deliver care for patients.

He told the conference that the population had been divided into five distinct patient groups: older people; other people with long-term conditions; people with mental health conditions; mothers and children; and the generally healthy.

CCGs will be scored on how well they deliver care to each of these groups of patients, Hunt said, and will also be ranked on their resilience – how well they handle extra pressures during winter, for example. And they will be assessed for “transformation”, covering areas such as integrating with other services or introducing electronic patient records.

Hunt said NHS England will be working with Prof Chris Ham, chief executive of the King’s Fund health thinktank, on developing “transparent metrics” that will hold CCGs accountable for the healthcare they deliver.

The quality of NHS care was a key theme in Hunt’s speech. He told delegates that he wanted the UK to be “one of the first countries in the world to understand the quality of whole patient care”.

Those CCGs that perform well in many areas will be left alone, he said, but added that those found to have persistent failures could expect intervention to improve performance.

Hunt said he wanted the Mid Staffordshire scandal to be a watershed moment for the health service, telling delegates: “I want Mid Staffs to be a moment of change for us where we resolve to become the safest healthcare system anywhere in the world.”

The healthcare sector, he said, should strive to match safety standards seen in the airline, nuclear and oil industries.

Improving safety in the health service would also lead to efficiency savings, said Hunt. He said: “We are going to reap the benefits not just in terms of patient care but the huge benefits in terms of efficiency.”