The NHS black hole – where does our money go?

Regular readers will know that spending on the NHS has shot up from �45bn in 1997 to about �105bn today. Even taking account of inflation, when you add in Gordon Brown’s disastrously expensive PFI hospitals, the NHS budget has more than doubled.

Yet this week we’ve had newspaper headlines screaming about an impending collapse in A&E services. So where has all our money gone?

Here’s a chart of government healthcare spending as a % of GDP across the world (click on charts to see them more clearly):

The UK seems to be doing quite well� and is near the top of the range.

So, here’s a chart of the number of hospital beds per 100,000 of population:

Whoops – at just 400 beds per 100,000 people, the UK is pitifully far below countries like Germany, Hungary, Lithuania and Austria which have nearer 800 hospital beds per 100,000 people.

And here’s a chart regular readers will know well – the number of NHS beds per NHS manager since 1997:

This has crashed down from about 8 beds per manager to around 3.8 beds per manager.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Oh, and here’s a lovely picture of the photogenic Sir David Nicholson, the man now responsible for the NHS. Though, with Sir David, as we know, he’s happy to take his big salary and even bigger pension but is never responsible for anything: