Health and Social Care in Wales matching England

In an interview on the BBC Today programme recently Vaughan Gething  responded to a BBC report that waiting times are much longer in Wales than in England.

Vaughen Gething said that in Wales, ‘we took a decision to look at the whole spectrum, of Health and Social Services),  together because we recognise there is no consequence free choice that we could make given the cuts made to our budget’.

by contrast in England the Conservatives decided to reduce spending on social care in order to protect certain parts of the NHS and it shows in the figures.

Between 2010-15 spending per head on Social Care has fallen by 11% in England and only 0.8% in Wales. In Health spending has risen by 4.3% in England and fallen by 2% in Wales. See the IFS report here.

The Nuffield Trust and the Kings Fund produced a report in 2014 in which they compare the performance of the Health Services in the UK, The four health systems of the United Kingdom: How do they compare?  They find that,

‘the performance gap between England and the rest of the UK has narrowed in recent years. There is little sign that one country is moving ahead of the others consistently across the available indicators of performance’,

and that, ‘Overall, this research suggests that despite hotly contested policy differences between the UK health systems since devolution on structure, competition, patient choice and the use of non-NHS providers, there is no evidence linking these policy differences to a matching divergence of performance, at least on the measures available across the four UK countries’.

These reductions in spending cause real pain and hardship to many people and you have to question whether they’re really necessary and whether they’re working?