The Health Foundation analysis for the Financial Times showed £901m was spent on buying services from private and non-NHS providers in 2015/16.
It said £800m was spent buying the same kind of care from NHS trusts.

The government said it showed the NHS was “making clinical judgments about delivering high-quality care.

Ex-chancellor George Osborne said in his final Autumn Statement before the 2015 general election that the money for NHS England was a “down payment” on a plan drawn up by NHS bosses, which called for an extra £8bn a year above inflation by 2020.

‘Diverted’ patients

The Health Foundation report also found that £1 in every £8 of local commissioner’s budgets in England is spent on care provided by non-NHS organisations.

Anita Charlesworth, director of research and economics at the Health Foundation, said: “Rising demand for emergency care meant that NHS providers haven’t had the capacity to deliver planned care and patients had to be diverted outside the NHS.

“NHS hospitals were left squeezed by sharply rising drug and staff costs with little additional funding.

“The result was big deficits that had to be covered by raids on investment budgets.”

She said the NHS had to “urgently” consider how to ensure additional funds reach NHS providers.

“The health service needs to plan better for emergency demand, fund emergency care fairly and make sure it gets the best possible price for care provided outside the NHS,” she said.

The Department of Health said it spends less than 10% of its budget on independent providers.

A spokesman said: “This report simply shows the NHS is making clinical judgments about delivering high-quality care for patients.

Dr Jon Orrell attended a meeting in Bridport last week along with Wendy Savage – a gynaecologist and campaigner of women’s rights in childbirth and fertility – and Claudia Sorin of Save SCBU, Maternity and Kingfisher at Dorset County Hospital.

Dr Orrell discussed the CCG, of which he was previously a member, and said the group don’t take their views from the public.

He said: “The CCG is the local organisation which has been tasked in making all these cuts palatable and trying to sell them. You will be told it is clinically driven, you will be told that it is an improvement and there is no alternative.

“The CCG is headed by local doctors, however it is compulsory, I can’t carry on being a GP practising in Dorset unless I am a member of the CCG.

“It is very much hierarchical… we don’t take our views from the public, it is top down and a culture of agreement – I have experienced this first hand.”

He also warned residents to look deeper in the Clinical Services Review document and to be careful when filling it out.

He added: “Throughout the document you will see ‘care in the community’ popping up and ‘care closer to home’ as if that is necessarily a good thing. It is all playing with words in my opinion.

“If you rename ‘care in the community’ to ‘neglect and anonymity’ you have got it closer to the truth.

“Looking after people properly costs a lot of money and you need more doctors, nurses and healthcare assistants to do it.

“Care in the community would be great if you did it to the same high standards and done properly as in hospitals, but they don’t and it is just a couple of hours a day, half-an-hour, and is not necessarily a nurse, it could be a healthcare assistant who is not trained – it is not the same.

“If you look at the document it all looks very bright and smiley – everyone is happy by this change. However, you get down to the detail and small print and you find the truth emerging – this isn’t improvement, this isn’t making things better, this is Dorset’s share of £22billion worth of national savings.

“Be careful with the consultation, it looks like they are putting [forward] something good, if you tick ‘yes’ to any of the boxes you are voting to close local services without realising it, you will close community hospitals and GP surgeries.

“The final word of warning – don’t be fooled by the warm words, the motherhood and apple pie in the document; look a bit deeper.

“Absolutely fill it in and get your family and friends to fill it in as our NHS depends on this.”

Wendy Savage spoke to the audience about threats to the NHS nationally, including Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) which outline how NHS trusts will make savings, and urged residents to talk to their local MPs and councillors about protecting the future of health care.

She said: “The latest threat are these STPs, or what we call slash, trash and privatise. Slash the funding, trash the local services and privatise.

“We have got to make sure parliamentary candidates as well as sitting MPs know that not supporting the NHS is the kiss of death.”

Claudia Sorin highlighted some of the concerns that members of the Save SCBU, Maternity and Kingfisher ward at Dorset County Hospital have and how safety could be compromised if services were moved to the east of the county.

She said: “Various families with seriously ill children or children with disabilities will have their provision at home in the community.

“When I spoke to one of the CCG members who is in charge of children services and maternity, she said ‘yes, that is the case’ – they will be given a package of money and they will be given that funding and they will organise it themselves in their own homes.

“That is the integrated community model; closing down beds in hospitals, closing down the children’s ward and maternity unit and that will be a midwife led unit only.

“Some of the mums on the campaign have open access to the children’s ward.

“That takes pressure off the emergency services, takes the pressure off the GPs because they can go straight to the Kingfisher Ward where the staff there know their child and can quickly give them the vital treatment that they need. This is something that is going to be lost if Kingfisher closes.

“The parents of these children have spoken to consultants there, the nursing staff, and all of them, on the whole, think that it would not be safe for a lot of the treatments that their children are coming in to the hospital for to have at home.

“The idea that maternity services and the children’s ward should be over in the east of the county, consultants at DCH are saying that would be complete madness.

“So this is the message we are getting from DCH – it would compromise safety to have those services over on the east of the county.”

A spokesperson for Dorset CCG said: “The proposals that have been developed by local clinicians and are subject to public consultation have been well documented over the last few months.

“We want to be absolutely clear that no decisions have been made, nor will they be until after the public consultation has ended and the feedback analysed.

“We invite anyone who attended either the drop-in event in January or the recent meeting in Bridport to get in touch if they would like more information or clarification before they complete their questionnaire.

“It is important that you don’t miss out on your opportunity to have a say and you complete the questionnaire by February 28th.

More than half of medics polled by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said patient safety has deteriorated over the past year and three quarters fear dangers to patients within 12 months.

The survey of more than 2,100 RCP members from across the UK found that 84 per cent had experienced staffing shortages. And less than half thought doctors at their trust would speak up if they were concerned about risks to patients.

In the survey, doctors said they were “firefighting”, “papering over the cracks” and “hanging on by their claws”. One said: “The hospital is operating at full capacity all of the time, We are asked (almost daily) to ‘lower our thresholds’ for what we consider to be a safe discharge.”

Medics said they were working in circumstances which were “completely unsafe” for patients, with one describing 55 emergency beds being opened, without extra staff.

“Currently the hospital is overfull, with patients on trolleys in corridors and in the middle of the bay (with no curtains, access to electricity, oxygen etc) .. elective surgery has been cancelled (including cancer surgery)” said one. “I feel like I’m on the Titanic” said another.

Research by the royal college found 43 per cent of doctors were working in departments with shortages of medics.

Prof Jane Dacre, RCP President, will today tell the college’s annual conference that doctors were being “pushed to their limits”. “We worry that there are inherent safety risks in a hospital running at full or over capacity – from an increase in hospital acquired infections to the impact of burnout from overworked staff,” she said.

Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “Hospital doctors are blowing the whistle on sliding standards in patient care – wards are full and without the staff to cope.
“Nursing staff share their fear that things will get even worse in the next year.”