Inefficient NHS Hospitals Waste Billions: Watchdog

"I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country." Donald Berwick, MD, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Poorly managed hospitals are wasting 1.6 billion pounds ($2.5 billion) a year of National Health Service money by failing to adopt efficient working practices, a UK spending watchdog said on Friday.

Productivity across all NHS hospitals has fallen at a rate of 1.4 percent a year since state funding was boosted in 2000, compared to a decline of just 0.2 percent in the NHS overall, the National Audit Office (NAO) said.

"Over the last ten years, there has been significant real growth in the resources going into the NHS, most of it funding higher staff pay and increases in headcount," said NAO head Amyas Morse.

"The evidence shows that productivity in the same period has gone down, particularly in hospitals," he added.

The coalition government said the findings showed the need for its radical restructuring of the health service.

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