Comment / Over to us

Suddenly I find myself writing my last comment article as president of HFMA. It feels like the year has passed very quickly but that’s not surprising – 2015 will certainly be a year that we will remember.

My theme of ‘Stronger together’ is about building personal resilience and strong relationships, both with clinicians inside our organisations and with colleagues across local health and social care systems. But in 2015 the battle to cope with rising staff costs, difficult savings targets, the requirements of the standard contract and battles over tariff have put individuals and relationships between commissioners and providers under constant pressure.

It feels to me that HFMA has done a valuable job this year in supporting members to cope with those pressures. While visiting our fantastic network of branches right across the UK, local chairs have told me they are seeing unprecedented numbers of delegates at events. They tell me staff have relished the chance to hear the latest views from system leaders and, more importantly, to be able to get together and talk about how it feels for them.

Large numbers of staff have also been able to benefit from the programme of ‘Stronger together’ development events that branches have provided free of charge to members to help them develop their personal resilience and confidence. I have been hugely impressed by the commitment of our staff to the NHS and to the patients we serve.

Despite 2015 being dominated by financial problems in the NHS, there have been some really positive developments. The vanguard programme is well established, with new models of care being developed right across the country; Lord Carter’s work with providers continues to progress; and the Greater Manchester devolution is preparing to go live in April 2016.

And I write this following a spending review that has allocated an additional £3.8bn above inflation for NHS England. It is a huge achievement to have been able to get so much of the additional £8bn commitment frontloaded into 2016/17.

Of course there are some significant cuts in other Department of Health budgets and the impact of these will only begin to emerge in the coming weeks. Providers will be keen to see how much of the new funds go into tariff and how much has strings attached.

The headline figure of £2bn growth in the current year didn’t appear to have any visible impact on the financial performance of the service, so I’m sure that finance directors will, as ever, be cautious about next year.

But the onus is on us to use next year to drive some real transformational change. Growth figures from 2017/18 reduce significantly, so if we don’t make real inroads into the financial deficit next year we will store up big problems for the following years.

NHS system leaders have secured as good a deal as we could get. It’s up to us to rise to the challenge and make a real difference. I hand over the HFMA presidency to my colleague Shahana Khan this month and she will be urging us on to do just that. I wish her and all of you the very best of luck for 2016.

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