Does this sound familiar?
The rising costs of drugs and treatments. and a growing and ageing population paint a compelling picture of why we have to modernise our health service and make it sustainable for the long term.
Without change, and despite the Government’s provision of an additional £11.5 billion in funding, the NHS will need £130 billion by 2015 – meaning a potential funding gap of nearly £20 billion a year. Fast forward to 2030, and the projections are even starker, with the number of over‑85s set to reach 3.5 million, or 5 per cent of the population. Based on these projections, the NHS would need to perform an extra two million operations.
Put simply, if things carry on unchanged, this would mean real terms health spending more than doubling to £230 billion. That is more than £7,000 a second – twice as much as we are spending today. This is something we simply cannot afford.
The Dish 