The NHS is not underfunded

John Bell, the former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was interviewed on today’s episode of the Today programme podcast. The following conversation with the BBC’s Nick Robinson has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve heard tell of the NHS problems for quite a long time. Let’s just go to the headline facts and some of the things that we know are coming out. Is the NHS underfunded, John?

So I think it is not underfunded. To be honest I think we need to get better at using the money that’s in it. It’s really interesting because if you go back to the Derek Wanless days, we did run a health care-service, which for many of my early years when I was a practicing physician, was profoundly underfunded and the outcomes weren’t bad. It was very cheap and cheerful. But then over the last five to ten years, we’ve been pumping up the amount of money going into the NHS.