Briefing / Roundtable: capital emergency

The NHS is in urgent need of capital funding. But a recent HFMA roundtable, supported financially by a sponsorship by Baxter Healthcare Ltd, agreed that changes were also needed to reduce the bureaucracy around bidding and the timeliness of allocations.

There has been a high profile focus on the government’s new hospital programme, but the service’s capital needs stretch much further than these 40 new builds. The roundtable discussed whether there were any opportunities to use system wide capital to support strategic projects that couldn’t be financed from a single organisation’s operational funds.

It also looked at perceived barriers to more flexible options to funding capital projects, such as the newly introduced financial reporting standard for leasing. And it debated the pros and cons of ringfencing capital via multiple small funding pots for specific purposes.