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Jersey is spending more of its budget on its ailing health service than any other country – and that spending is likely to rise even further, at least in the short-term, to address previous "underinvestment", according to the Health Minister.
While health's finances are currently subject to a strict recovery plan, Deputy Tom Binet said that an "extra chunk of money" may be needed in the short-term to address the pressing "hurdles" the department is facing.
His observations followed the release of a report yesterday that ranked the island's spending on different services against other OECD nations.
Published by Statistics Jersey, the 'Government employment, revenue and expenditure' report showed that 28.5% of the island's government expenditure in 2021 went on Health – higher than the 20.5% shelled out by the UK government, 15.3% in Malta, 15.6% in France and the EU average of 15.8%.
The first of its kind, the report drew together information from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), and various government departments.
At first glance, the figures are difficult to understand, but, essentially, 28.1% of the island's economic output (measured in GDP – Gross Domestic Product) is spent on the public sector. This is compared to 59% of France's GDP and 48.2% of the UK's. This does not mean that the island spends significantly less per citizen – in fact, we spend similar amounts – but we have a larger economy and so it is a smaller proportion of that.
Jersey spends a lower proportion than other jurisdictions on defence, and more on education and health – in fact, it spends the most of its budget on health out of all other countries.
In 2021, the Government spent 28.5% of their budget on Health – compared to 21.2% in Ireland, 20.5% in the UK, which were some of the next highest.
Pictured: How Jersey spent its budget on general public services (dark blue), public order (grey), economic affairs (yellow), environment (green), housing (light blue), health (navy), culture (brown), education (purple), social protection (turquoise).
However, this does not mean we spend more on each islander's healthcare than in the UK. When adjusted per capita, Jersey's and the UK's government spends almost exactly the same, around $5,000USD.
Jersey had the second-highest proportional spend of these five jurisdictions on education, which represented 11.6% of government expenditure in Jersey, 11.2% in the UK, 12% in Ireland, 8.9% in France, and 9.4% in the EU.
Health Minister Tom Binet said: "We're trying to provide a comprehensive hospital service for 100,000 people on an island where we have no advantage in terms of scale. There are no economies of scale."
Pictured: A look at how much we spend per person (in USD) in each area.
He highlighted that we were spending marginally less per capita on islanders' healthcare than the UK and that an NHS hospital in the UK would typically service more people than ours.
Deputy Binet said: "What we have to do over the next couple of years is to make the health service as comprehensive and efficient as we can. After that, it will cost what it costs. But we have to make sure that the whole machinery of the health service is efficient from one end to the other."
Deputy Binet continued: "If we want a really first-class health service, we may have to look at additional ways of funding it. There's going to be a big focus on private health insurance as part of that, but we need to ascertain how much we really do need to run a good health service and decide over the coming year how we're going to go about achieving that extra funding.
"What's become apparent to me in the few weeks I've been in this role is that we have underinvested in health, I think. We haven't had sufficient focus on keeping pace with developing the health service.
"...I don't think we've managed our health service as comprehensively as we should. We haven't had enough focus on where it's going, with a clear plan for it.
"We're not in the best situation. There are a number of issues to be resolved and a lot of catch-up work to be done, both in the way that things are managed, and the investment that's required in certain areas to bring us up to speed."
Pictured: Deputy Binet has recently taken over as Health Minister.
The Minister added: "There's a clear picture emerging for me, and I seriously believe we may have to find a chunk of extra money, short-term money, to overcome some of the hurdles to bring us up to date, after which health funding levels will settle.
"If we don't get our preventative actions up to date, in terms of illness prevention, we're going to be playing catch-up forever. And there are various programmes we need to introduce to get us up to date with the full level of healthcare that we need.
"We can't be efficient and offer a comprehensive service unless we take the pain of bringing ourselves up to where we need to be. If we stay behind, all we're going to do is drag more and more money in to offer a mediocre service."
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