A top doctor has revealed astonishing waste in the NHS after the health service offered to spend £70 on a taxi to courier him a missing 50p pill. Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, the former deputy chief medical officer of England, recounted how a hospital pharmacy offered to deliver the medication in the most inefficient way.
Sir Jonathan, who became famous for his no-nonsense appearances at Downing Street briefings during the Covid pandemic, was speaking at a conference on NHS fraud and inefficiency when he explained his own personal experience. He revealed that a hospital pharmacy offered to courier a tablet to him after they ran out of stock.
The medical expert explained he declined an offer to return to the pharmacy in person as it would involve a 60-mile round trip, but he was stunned when the hospital said it could pay £70 for a taxi to bring it to him.
According to The Times, Sir Jonathan told the conference: "Of course, knowing what I know, I knew that the cost of that tablet was at worst 90p, at best 50p. And so I had to manually phone my GP and say, look, can you possibly prescribe me one tablet of this and it will save another bit of the NHS this heap of money that they're going to throw at the problem in the most inefficient way?"
Sir Jonathan used the example to show how waste and a lack of shared data within the NHS is leading to the squandering of taxpayer money. "Had pharmacy data sets been linked up, for example, in a much more intelligent, maybe AI-assisted way, I could have been directed somewhere else to pick that up rather than having to solve the problem myself," he added. "But most people don't bother to solve the problem. They'll just take the solution that's offered, which would have been very costly for the system."
Former health minister Lord James Bethell told the Times it showed how patients believed the health service accepted "mad, crazy, extraordinary arrangements" that would not be tolerated elsewhere. "The general public can smell that fraud is apparent," he said.
