A previous health minister and eminent healthcare leader, Lord Darzi, recently said:
‘Too often politicians have seen healthcare as a cost to be contained rather than an opportunity to deliver better lives and greater national prosperity.’1
Darzi was urging us to view healthcare funding as an investment in the national economy rather than as a taxpayer cost, constantly to be curtailed. His comment came in response to a well-argued think tank report on the potential for investment to reduce secondary care elective waiting lists, both surgical and medical.2 The report by LCP Health Analytics provides a breakdown of the economic benefits of investing in the NHS Elective Recovery Plan, aiming to achieve a 30% increase in capacity relative to pre-COVID levels for inpatient and outpatient treatments by 2025. If successfully implemented (a big ‘if’, considering workforce capacity shortfalls and the impact of industrial action), overall economic benefits would amount to £73 billion over 5 years, with an additional £14 billion savings on health and social care costs and on informal care services.
Such a staggering boost to the national economy needs to be considered from a primary care perspective. Annual funding for primary care, currently running at almost £15 billion, pales into insignificance in the face of such large projected benefits from further secondary care investment (2021/22 data).3 So how have the authors calculated the benefits of ‘elective recovery’ and how does this relate to primary care?
ITEMISING ECONOMIC BENEFIT OF HEALTHCARE INVESTMENT
The LCP Health Analytics report found that reducing the waiting-list backlog would generate £18 billion through …
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