On 5 July this year the NHS will be 70. In all its 70 years it has rarely been far from the headlines. It has been through more than its fair share of reforms, crises and funding ups and downs. Over that period, the amount we spend on it has risen inexorably. Yet, today, concerns about the...

Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

Funding the National Health Service is the biggest single thing the government does, so it is not surprising that it is at the forefront of the election campaign. In this report, we look at how health spending has changed over the last 70 years and place funding increases since 2010 in the...

Recent years have seen substantial reductions in public spending on social care for older people in England. This has not only led to large falls in the number of people over the age of 65 receiving publicly funded social care, but also to growing concern about the potential knock-on effects on...

This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care. Mean per-person long-term care spending fell by 31% between 2009/10 and 2017/18 as part of a large austerity...

This paper uses linked survey responses and administrative hospital records to examine the accuracy of self-reported medical diagnoses. The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) collects self-reported information on the incidence of heart attacks, strokes and cancer in the past two years....

There is widespread and unexplained variation in the outcomes of similar patients across place and providers in all developed health systems. This paper provides new evidence on the role senior doctors play in determining patient outcomes. I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of...

One year ago, NHS England published its plan to tackle the backlog of elective care, which had surged following the onset of the pandemic. Since then, as widely expected, waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have continued to grow, increasing by around 1 million between February and...