Cost of care

The huge increase in health spending, sanctioned 10 years ago by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was always intended to be a temporary one, its aim being to raise UK healthcare to the standard enjoyed by other European nations. The fact that the tap was turned off at around the same time as Britain entered an economic crisis is pure bad luck, or so Mr Brown would undoubtedly say.

In other words, there is no way that the NHS can exist in a vacuum, immune from the need to make public services work more efficiently and more effectively, particularly when the potential to curb waste is clear to every patient who enters the health service's ever-growing bureaucracy.

This is why the decision by East Riding NHS to explain to patients exactly how much their clinical procedures are costing is a sensible one.

The very fact that Britain has a growing population, with increased longevity and raised expectations of what the NHS can do, is, in large part, a tribute to the health service's success. But, if it is to become still more effective, patients must realise that their expectations have to be tempered by reality, that doctors and nurses can indeed work miracles, but that every one of those miracles comes at a price.