7:30am Friday 3rd September 2010
By Matt Watts
The borough’s public health provider has come under fire for spending £3.6m in the last financial year on management consultants, money that should have been spent on frontline services, critics said.
Health watchdog London Health Emergency (LHE) said it was “absolutely scandalous” Lambeth Primary Care Trust (PCT) managers spent money on consultants to do work they should be capable of doing themselves.
NHS Lambeth, part of the PCT, said the proportion of its £650m budget spent on consultants was under 0.5 per cent and necessary because it did not have the level of in house expertise required to deliver the best possible services.
But LHE chairman Geoff Martin said the cash could have funded 100 additional nurses at a time when there was a freeze on recruitment because of swingeing funding cuts.
He said: “Its absolutely scandalous at a time when health service budgets and frontline services are under massive pressure that millions of pounds of NHS cash is being squandered on management consultancy.
“There are more than enough managers around paid directly by the NHS without those same people hauling in consultants on £1,000 a day to do the same jobs they are being paid to do themselves.”
The £3.6m outlay is equivalent to £12.51 from every Lambeth resident.
Details of the consultancy spend, totalling £114m across London, came in the last year of the Labour Government. The information was released by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley in what was seen as a highly politicised move.
Mr Lansley wants to slice billions from NHS budgets, including millions from Lambeth’s yearly budget, some of which is expected to come from reducing consultancy spends of up to 45 per cent during the next four years.
NHS Lambeth interim chief executive Andrew Eyres said: “Delivering top-quality healthcare in one of the UK’s most deprived boroughs is a complex and challenging task, for which the PCT has an ambitious programme of service development and improvement.”
He said there were times external expertise was required, but the PCT always delivered a balanced budget.
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