This week HSJ introduces a new section in the magazine. HSJ Finance has two goals: to explore how increasing financial pressures are impacting on the NHS, and to plot the developing relationship between the service and the private sector.

On the financial front, it will explore issues such as funding allocations, the QIPP programme and the treatment of NHS surpluses and deficits. We will examine national policy, but also report on how specific local health economies are being affected.

Wrapped up in this quest for efficiency and struggle for financial viability will be an ever more complex relationship with the private sector. Not just the proposed use of “any willing provider”, but the likely involvement of the outsourcing firms to provide a wide range of support services and the changes to procurement practice brought about, for example, by the end of the national IT programme. We will cover it all.

Please let us know what you think of the HSJ Finance and how we might improve it.

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