Can someone tell me what public spending cuts will actually mean? Whatever party gets in.

[minxofmancunia]

I know that cuts are inevitable but want to know more about the actual reality of them. Which sector will be affected the most? How it will affect education/health social policy etc?

TBH as well as being concerned about the counrty I'm also concerned about my job! Work in the NHS for CAMHS and sense there may be redundancies, am on mat leave at mo and am a part time worker. Need to think about what would happen if I was made redundant.

Looked on NHS jobs recently and instead of the usual 40+ jobs advertised there were only 8 eeek! Is this the shape of things to come?

In health, main thing is a shift of care from acute to primary/community. MH less affected, as that's not where the major savings are, so CAMHS should be reasonably safe. The gap between income and costs is going to be very big, but we don't know just how big, as it depends on two imponderables:

1. How much money will be coming in. The politicians have been saying "we will not cut the NHS" for a long time. The planning interpretation of that has been "the NHS gets no more cash in 2011 than it did in 2010" -- after having had 9% more year-on-year since 1997, that's quite a shock to the system. But Cameron has apparently just pledged that the NHS will get inflationary rises, which would imply 2 to 5% growth in income, so a bit more cash coming in. TBH, it all depends on how big the bigger hole between total government income and total government expenditure is.
2. How much it will cost to provide services. As income has risen in the past few years by 9% per annum, so costs have more than kept pace. But which came first, chicken or egg? We don't know.

thankyou slhilly that's interesting. We treat acute cases in the community i suppose as part of our work but also manage some milder cases. What we do do which is what runs us ragged is manage actively self harming young people to try to prevent suicide/hospital admission. there are not enough of us to manage this as it is, if you have more than 2 of these cases at any one time you literally are unable to deal with the less acute cases at all. Cutting back staff numbers would increase risk considerably.

The focus of efforts is on just what you do -- more and better "upstream interventions" to cut the need to spend money on treating more acute exacerbations. So I think you're broadly ok.

Cuts will appear anywhere and everywhere that public money is spent. Means investments, budgets, wages, benefits, pensions and jobs. There will be fewer new projects started, fewer warships purchased or upgrades to buildings or renewals of equipment. There could be requests for voluntary redundancy as well as compulsory. People who retire may not be replaced. Permanent staff may be replaced by agency workers. Wage rises will be greatly reduced if not dispensed with all together (like in the private sector). Benefit parameters are likely to change so that fewer qualify and more are expected to pay for themselves. Universal benefits may become means-tested.

If you're lucky enough to hold on to a reasonably well-paid job, you'll find that you end up with less in your pay-packet because tax will rise to make up the rest.

Any government with any sense will spread the pain around all departments and it'll be the department with the strongest ministerial team that wins the cash.

Most of what Chil1234 says is true (although replacing NHS organisations are trying to reduce the proportion of staffing spend on agency, not increase it, as it's more expensive). But none of it changes what I said in answer to the original q, which is how it will affect CAMHS. The NHS has been preparing for a £20bn squeeze by 2013/14 just under 20% of current spend. The only way to achieve that is through transformation getting better at stopping people getting seriously sick. So that's what they're trying to do. Prevention and early intervention are going to be heavily emphasised.