The National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest employers in the world, and is the biggest in Europe, with over 1.3 million staff.
For the NHS a typical day includes:
- over 835,000 people visiting their GP practice or practice nurse
- almost 50,000 people visiting accident and emergency departments
- 49,000 outpatient consultations
- 94,000 people admitted to hospital as an emergency admission
- 36,000 people in hospital for planned treatment
On the 6th September 2021 the Government announced that the NHS will receive an extra £5.4 billion over the next 6 months to support its response to COVID-19 and help tackle waiting lists.
The funding will immediately go towards supporting the NHS to manage the immediate pressures of the pandemic. This includes an extra £1 billion to help tackle the COVID-19 backlog, £2.8 billion to cover related costs such as enhanced infection control measures to keep staff and patients safe from the virus and £478 million to continue the hospital discharge programme, freeing up beds.
The additional £5.4 billion brings the government’s total investment to health services for COVID-19 so far in 2021 to over £34 billion, with £2 billion in total for the NHS to tackle the elective backlog.