The deal with Virgin Care comes as the head of England’s NHS secured an extra £3.8 billion for frontline care, having convinced Chancellor George Osborne the healthcare budget must be “front loaded”.
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Mr Stevens said getting the sizeable increase next year rather than seeing the money phased in gradually would help “stabilise current pressures” and kick-start a fundamental redesign of care.
The financial injection will form part of the chancellor’s spending review due on Wednesday, and represents a front-loading of the £8.4bn previously promised by 2021 after weeks of intense arguments between the Treasury and Simon Stevens, the NHS England chief executive.
“You can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy and it’s only because we have taken the hard decisions needed to cut the deficit and are delivering economic security that we are able to commit an additional 10 billion pounds a year by 2020 to the NHS”, Osborne will say, according to prepared remarks released by his office.
They are already missing many of their key targets covering A&E, ambulance response times and cancer care.
“This will mean world-class treatment for millions more patients, deliver a truly seven-day health service and allow the NHS to implement its five-year plan to transform the services patients receive” said Osborne.
Rob Webster, chief executive of NHS Confederation, welcomed the extra NHS funding but said, “We are clear that significant risks remain”.
As well as the £3.8bn funding increase, additional cash will be available for vanguard projects to develop new models of care and £300m more spent on cancer diagnostics every year.
“However, any move to redefine and shrink the definition of the NHS would be particularly worrying”.
The funding boost represents a rise of almost 4% on NHS England’s £101bn front-line budget this year.
Also, to meet the growing demands of an ageing population, the additional funding will enable the NHS to improve out of hospital services that will result in people receiving treatment closer to home.
Prime Minister David Cameron said: “This government is committed to the values of our National Health Service – and with this historic level of investment we are delivering on that by fully backing the NHS’s own plan for the future”.
It was revealed earlier this month that NHS trusts have racked up a deficit of £1.6 billion in the first six months of the 2015-16 financial year.
Despite this, most economists think he is likely to miss his targets to reduce borrowing this year and some think he will struggle with his goal to reach a meaningful budget surplus before the next national election in May 2020.
“We need to see the fine print tomorrow to know whether this announcement is quite as generous as it seems”.
Shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander said: “As always with this Government’s announcements on the NHS, the devil is in the detail”. We are passionate about building an NHS that offers the safest, highest quality care anywhere in the world – with services smoothly operating 7 days a week.
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“If the funding gap in social care is not adequately addressed, costs will be shifted to health and if we don’t use resources to keep people healthier for longer, we store up trouble for the future”, he added.
