Productivity of the English National Health Service: 2020/21 update

This paper measures NHS England ' s productivity in 2020/21, covering the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. This presented some challenges to how CHE calculated and interpreted their measure of productivity growth. The problems of accurately capturing the impact of the pandemic on both NHS inputs and outputs means that they would expect to find a negative growth in NHS productivity between 2019/20 and 2020/21 and this was found to be the case. It found that NHS productivity fell by around 24 per cent, on account of both a substantial decrease in outputs (16.05 per cent) and an increase in inputs (10.49 per cent). Although this does reflect a genuine reduction in the number of patients seen and treated during 2020/21 due to the pandemic, it does not mean that the NHS has produced less health than in previous years.
Source: Current Awareness Service for Health (CASH) - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news