Why isn’t the NHS improving faster?

Subscribe now: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | ACAST | YouTube | RSS

The NHS holds a unique place in British life: a source of national pride, and the single biggest public service in England. This year it’s set to cost over £200 billion, around £3,500 per person, more than we spend on education, defence, justice and transport combined. And yet, despite sustained funding increases and around a quarter of a million more staff than in 2019, concerns about performance haven’t gone away.

Labour came into office promising to get a grip on record waiting times, but progress so far looks limited. The waiting list stands at 7.4 million, only slightly down from around 7.6 million when the government took office a year and a half ago. With winter pressures, flu surges, and resident doctors taking strike action, it raises a big question: what’s actually going on inside the system, and is improvement realistically on the horizon?

In this episode, Helen is joined by IFS colleagues Olly Harvey-Rich and Max Warner to unpack the data and the trade-offs. We look at winter pressures and capacity, what the latest performance metrics tell us, and the real constraints facing the NHS in England - money, productivity, workforce, capital, and system design. Finally, we look ahead to the rest of the parliament: should we be hopeful about meaningful change, or are the obstacles bigger than the plans?

Zooming in discussion questions:

These are a set of questions designed for A Level economics students to discuss, written by teacher Will Haines.

1. What are the benefits and costs of the NHS operating at full capacity as an organisation?
2. How can the productivity and effectiveness of the NHS be measured?
3. What short-term and long-term changes would you propose to improve the performance of the NHS?