> The NHS has a record budget of £200 billion for 2022 Spending over the last couple of years is obviously going to be an outlier due to the effects of COVID a

> The NHS has a record budget of £200 billion for 2022 Spending over the last couple of years is obviously going to be an outlier due to the effects of COVID and COVID restrictions. > How much extra money do they need The strangling of the NHS has been occurring over many years, so it's difficult to give a simple figure in response. But it is telling that in 2016 junior doctors organised the first general NHS strike in 40 years in response to Hunt's contract scrapping overtime rates while increasing overtime hours. We now have a serious issue with junior doctors leaving the NHS: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hsr2.419 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hsr2.419 This year the Royal College of Nursing organised a strike for the first time in its 100+ year history, in response to years of below-inflation pay rises. In 2018, the Health Foundation put out a response to the government's proposed budget increase of 3.4%: https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/health-foundation-response-to-government-announcement-of-additional-nhs-funding https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/health-found... > Increases of at least 4% a year are the minimum needed to tackle the backlog of financial problems from eight years of austerity. Increases of just 3.4% a year mean longer waits for treatment, ongoing staff shortages, deterioration of NHS buildings and equipment, and little progress to address cancer care. > It’s worrying that yet again, the funding increase appears to only apply to NHS England’s budget. This excludes vital areas of health spending such as staff training, capital investment and public health. There are at least 92,000 staff vacancies in the NHS and public health spending fell by a fifth in real terms between 2013/14 and 2018/19. £200 billion looks like a big number, but it's meaningless when critical front-line services are seeing real-terms cuts. There is a consistent pattern of the government cutting investment to the front line, ignoring the objections, and deflecting blame when the inevitable consequences occur. We are seeing those consequences not because the NHS is inherently wasteful, but because the government is choosing to make public services look like they perform badly.