NHS England won’t publish data on where it spends its money, including to private companies. What happened to the promised transparency?
The new NHS is big on transparency. Tim Kelsey, the senior official overseeing care.data and all things digital in the NHS yesterday announced that transparency is “the most important innovation in health”, adding rather dramatically: “The closed world is the enemy of good care.” Jeremy Hunt has said greater openness makes the NHS ‘safer for patients’. NHS England chief, Simon Stevens, has gone as far as claiming that NHS England “has set new standards for openness and transparency in all of its operations, compared with what went before.” The rhetoric is clear. But how transparent is the new NHS? Not very, it turns out. NHS England is one of the only (if not the only) government body that does not regularly publish how it spends our money. Given that they are stewards of the NHS’s £95 billion budget, this matters.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/tamasin-cave/nhs-england-where’s-money-going
Filed under: NHS, Uncategorized, money, NHS England
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