Dr George Stoye

The COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the country – and indeed many other countries. What sets this crisis apart is the many different ways that it is impacting families: while the virus itself is primarily a public health issue, the unprecedented responses it has necessitated mean that this is also very much an economic and a social crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic will have huge impacts on the National Health Service (NHS). Patients suffering from the illness are placing unprecedented demands on acute care, particularly on intensive care units (ICUs). This has led to an effort to dramatically increase the resources available to NHS hospitals in treating these patients, involving reorganisation of hospital facilities, redeployment of existing staff and a drive to bring in recently retired and newly graduated staff to fight the pandemic.

The national Accident and Emergency (A&E) four-hour waiting time target is once again in the news headlines. Performance against this recently fell to the lowest since records began, with only 79.8% of patients in December 2019 admitted, discharged or transferred to another hospital within 4 hours as opposed to the 95% standard.

Here we outline an initial response from IFS researchers on the Conservative party manifesto. We take policy areas by turn but this is not a full assessment.

Below we outline an initial response from IFS researchers on the Labour manifesto. We take policy areas by turn but this is not a full assessment.

Below we outline an initial response from IFS researchers on the Liberal Democrat manifesto. We take a number of policy areas by turn but this is not a full assessment.

The Labour party has today announced their commitments for NHS spending over the next four years if they were to win the 2019 general election. These plans imply day-to-day NHS spending in England that is more generous than current government plans. This announcement also covers all parts of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) budget in England – including money for frontline day-to-day spending, other day-to-day spending and capital spending. We set out below the details of each of these in turn.

This IFS Public Talk, jointly organised with the University of Manchester and part of the 2019 ESRC Festival of Social Science, gave an economist's perspective on how we, as a country, can pay for our health and social care system.

In a new working paper we use new data to reconfirm the distinction between age and death costs, and importantly to highlight differences in average end of life costs between individuals with different characteristics.