Daily Insight: Scrutiny on the bounty

NHS budgets look set to be raided again as it emerged a new £500m fund to help ease the pressure on hospitals over winter wasn’t so new after all.

The winter “adult social care discharge fund” was the centrepiece of Therese Coffey’s first major intervention as health and social care secretary but it soon became clear that the money was being drawn from existing Department of Health and Social Care and NHS budgets.

Another slice is coming from money originally given to departments to pay higher national insurance contributions under the health and social care levy. Now that’s been cancelled, ministers are free to “recycle” what is yet to be used, so cancelling a tax rise designed to fund health and care actually left the NHS with slightly more money – for now.

Beyond that, the DHSC budget is already under pressure after it lost a row over covid testing, while NHS England is having to cough up to cover inflation and an unfunded pay rise.

Ms Coffey described the fund as a down payment on a “rebalancing” of budgets across health and care to begin next year – an ominous echo of prime minister Liz Truss’s suggestion that NHS funding could be diverted to prop up social care.

Pregnant pause

A patient safety target has been put on hold “until maternity services in England can demonstrate sufficient staffing levels” to meet it.

The Midwifery Continuity of Care model was designed to ensure expectant mothers would be cared for by the same small team of midwives throughout their pregnancy, labour and postnatal care.

But in her report on the care failures at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust’s maternity department, Donna Ockenden said the MCoC model should be suspended until more evidence was gathered about its effectiveness and there were enough midwives to meet minimum staffing requirements.

Ms Ockenden said patient safety had been “compromised by the unprecedented pressures that CoC models of care place on maternity services already under significant strain”.