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Figures reveal NHS spent £350m on consultants

May 10 2009 Sunday Sun

“A very significant sum of money is clearly being spent on setting up competition in the NHS and pursuing Foundation status, rather than being invested in patient care. You only have to look at what happened at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust to see the consequences of this.”

A scathing report earlier this year into up to 1200 excess deaths in Mid-Staffordshire criticised the trust board for being more interested in attaining foundation status than patient care.

The RCN believes that the actual total spent on management consultants in 2008/09 may be higher, as more than 40 per cent of the NHS organisations which it contacted did not provide details of their spending within the legal deadline.

Cutting the money spent on management consultants could deliver 11 per cent of the £2.3bn savings demanded from the Department of Health in Alistair Darling’s Budget last month, said Dr Carter.

“Before the Department of Health and local health trusts look at cutting frontline services, training budgets or new facilities, they need to look very carefully at the money spent on external advice,” he said.

“When some management consultants are getting more than £1000 a day to advise on finance, we must be able to afford improvements to the quality of patient care.”

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