WHAT is it with the NHS and money? If this were the private sector there would be Roveresque headlines about receivers and redundancies.

Instead there is talk of bail-outs and “restructuring balance sheets”.

The Health Service Journal (June 30) says that the Department of Health is to look “sympathetically” at the financial plight of debt-ridden trusts. This is in response to pleas for the debts to be written off as hospitals struggle to cope with foundation status and payment by results.

Ahead of the game, according to Building (July 1), is University College Hospital in London which has been given a £45 million “PFI supplement” to bail it out of its private finance initiative debt.

Not that all trusts should bank on similar hand-outs says Brian Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Healthcare Development at the University of Sheffield, although he tells Health Management (July): “Getting all the books balanced will cause serious political noise.” Debt write-offs set a dangerous precedent, says Martin Hensher, an NHS Confederation policy manager, who, in HSJ, likens the situation to that of eradicating debt in Africa: “The Government can say that this would only be a one-off, but having done it once the expectation is that it can happen again.”

The African debt analogy is apt given a report elsewhere in the journal that the G8 protests could cost the NHS £1.5 million — the price of providing medical services along the march route and of drafting extra staff into A&E departments.

But the NHS’s saviour is more likely to be Jim Gee, chief executive of the counter fraud and security management service, than Bob Geldof or Gordon Brown. Gee tells Computing (June 30): “Overall we’ve saved the NHS £675 million between 1999 and 2005.”

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