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Targets for NHS trusts to step up their elective activity have been scaled down, internal data seen by HSJ reveals.
The targets range from 103 per cent of pre-pandemic levels to nearly 130 per cent, with the wide gap indicating the slow pace of recovery at many trusts last year.
Forty trusts have been set the least ambitious target, to deliver 103 per cent of pre-covid activity levels in 2023-24, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals, Barts Health, and University Hospitals Birmingham.
All providers were supposed to deliver at least 104 per cent of pre-covid activity last year, but few managed to achieve this.
The data seen by HSJ, which was issued to local finance chiefs by NHS England, suggests two-thirds of around 120 acute trusts performed less elective activity in the first half of 2022-23 than they did in the same period before covid.
Croydon Health Services has the highest activity target this year, of 127 per cent, matching what the trust delivered in the first half of last year. Read the full story here.
Too much information
The blame for a “bigger and more complex” level of reporting for the £8bn better care fund has been laid at the door of ministers.
Officials from the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England told a webinar this week that they had tried to “push back” on requests for extra information, prompted by ministers’ increased interest in spending on discharge.
One source described the result as a “huge amount” of extra work.
This is despite the Hewitt review calling for a dramatically slimmed-down set of national priorities and criticising continual and often “extremely detailed” requests for information by central bodies.
The better care fund is split between integrated care boards and local authorities, and then pooled and spent jointly through the Better Care Fund.
Speaking on the webinar, BCF officials – who work for both NHSE and DHSC – said: “Current DHSC ministers are very interested in the detail, and they have been interested to unpack it more than perhaps was previously the case. As I say, we’ve been trying to manage those requests, but we appreciate the complexity has gone up.”
Also on hsj.co.uk today
Few staff groups better illustrate the under-representation of women in senior roles in the NHS than estates and facilities management, writes Zoe Tidman in The Ward Round, and in Comment, Rukshana Kapasi writes about Barnardo’s Health Equity Collaborative, which will help devise solutions on health issues faced by children and other young people.
