Cuts to the public health budget will ‘add to the score of human misery and inequality’ if they are not dropped from the chancellor’s spending review at the end of November, according to Janet Davies, the RCN’s chief executive.
In June the chancellor George Osborne announced that £200m would be taken from local authorities in January 2016. This will be done by a cut of 6.2% from all local authority budgets. These are expected to be confirmed in the spending review, due to be announced on 25 November. ‘There is barely a person in the UK who is not affected by public health services, covering everything from obesity to tobacco and sexual health to alcohol,’ said Ms Davies. ‘Not only will people face preventable poor health because help and advice is not available, but families and communities are likely to be plunged into a spiral of health deprivation which becomes almost impossible to break.’
Services that could be include school nursing and other child health services, suicide prevention and domestic violence prevention, drug and alcohol, sexual health, weight loss support, smoking cessation, and mental health. Estimates from the RCN and other public health organisations predict that this could inadvertently lead to costs of over £1 billion for the NHS. This is due to the impact of cuts to services that could have prevented treatment at an earlier stage.
‘Nurses understand the value of ill health prevention and early intervention in improving outcomes for patients and saving the NHS money,’ said Dr Sheila Marriott, director of the RCN in the East Midlands. ‘Cutting spending on public health services commissioned by local councils will increase potentially avoidable demand for hospital services that are ultimately more expensive for the NHS to provide. It’s a false economy, bad news for patients and bad news for taxpayers.’
Some organisations have claimed that the cuts will disproportionately impact certain areas, particularly those with large, urban populations in London and the South East. ‘The Government cannot say that they are protecting the budget for the NHS and at the same time make huge cuts to council-run health services which are there to keep people well and out of hospital,’ said Jeannett Martin, the RCN’s South East regional director. ‘The NHS will end up paying for these savings many times over.’