NHS black hole – is it broken?

The NHS black hole has been long developing with a deficit of £2.45bn last year. Senior NHS managers are drawing up the services that could be cut says Laura Donnelly in the Daily Telegraph back in early September.
It is thought the NHs will need to deliver £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020/21 if it just to balance the books. This is not going to be easy since we spend already 9.9% of our GDP on health with the NHS spending ring fenced already against austerity.

The increasing numbers of sick, obese and an increasing elderly population will inevitably mean something will have to be done about it otherwise we will no longer staring into an NHS black hole but be consumed by it.

So what can be done?

The government, whichever side of the divide, will at some point need to shake the NHS up. The immense burden locum and non-clinical staff make on the service and the incessant waste will need to be tackled and likely a restructuring of the NHS will hopefully show that this is not a free service. The NHS is simply free at the point of care. We already pay for the NHS via taxes so is not a free service.

Obesity has already been mentioned in this article and must be tackled as a starting point. As medicine inevitably advances in its ability to treat and prevent ill health it comes at a great cost. New medical advances have a high cost in their delivery and also in that they contribute to the ageing population because we are living longer lives, healthy or not.

If we made that individual move towards a healthier life we can reduce the burden on the NHS, moving us further away from the NHS black hole, through lessening the health risks associated with carrying excess weight. 

How do I lose weight and help the NHS?

Losing weight is not easy for many people mainly because we are expected to just miraculously find eating less than we were. As if this is something we haven’t tried before. The use of meal replacements is the logical solution for those who find cutting down long term on their food intake difficult or even impossible.

At Waistaway we offer a range of diet solutions ranging from helping people to just eat less, partially replace their food using our FLEX diet all the way up to replacing all their food on our SURE diet plan using the Lipotrim pharmacy total food replacement programme.