THE Health Department’s record £381 million budget is “the bare minimum” needed to keep services running – and will not be enough to clear long waiting lists, the minister has warned.
Deputy Tom Binet told the Health and Social Security Scrutiny Panel that, although the additional £60 million in proposed funding makes his budget “appear like a much bigger number,” much of it relates to new services being brought under his department.
Unveiled last month, the government’s proposed Budget for 2026 includes £381m of spending on healthcare – a rise of almost a fifth on 2024.
However, Deputy Binet said around £22 million of that figure relates to the transfer of the Ambulance Service and other functions into his newly integrated organisation, Health Care Jersey.
While saying he was “grateful” for the extra funding, the minister described the allocation as the “bare minimum” needed to close the department’s long-running deficit – currently around £12 million – and to maintain essential services.
The hearing also heard that the department hopes to break even next year by finding £9 million in savings, which would leave about £15 million in net new funding.
Of that, £12 million will be ring-fenced for health prevention initiatives and improvements to digital systems.
“It’s not a delivery to health paradise,” Deputy Binet said. “It puts us in a good, strong position to make real progress in the real world.”
The department’s prevention programme will receive £4 million a year – a third of its original £12 million bid – to fund early-intervention and screening measures.
Deputy Binet said the figure was reached after “a summer of negotiations” and reflected what could realistically be delivered in the first year.
Public Health director Peter Bradley said the programme is designed to tackle the biggest causes of ill health and pressures on the hospital.
“The ambition here was underlined by modelling which showed that people on average have about 20 years of ill health,” he said. “That would require, in the next couple of decades, an increase in hospital bed days of around 30%. That’s the situation we were trying to address.”
He said the work will focus on identifying people most at risk of chronic conditions through health checks, delivering evidence-based prevention programmes, and improving early diagnosis through expanded cancer screening.
“We know that diabetes can be prevented about 80% of the time if people are given the right support,” he added. “That might mean medical advice, medicines and lifestyle changes.
“The other element is about earlier diagnosis, so typically this would be around areas like cancer screening…so things like lung cancer screening and extending the bowel cancer screening.”
The panel heard that Jersey currently spends about 2% of its health budget on prevention, compared with 4% in the UK and nearly 6% in Canada.
Professor Bradley said the aim is to close that gap over time, supported by better use of digital tools to target vulnerable groups more effectively.
Deputy Binet added that elements removed from the original prevention bid – which included school-based health programmes to encourage healthy habits in children – could be revisited in future.
The digital plan – which aims to improve systems so staff can share patient information more easily, send prescriptions electronically, and keep all health records in one place – will receive £8m a year, after its original £70m five-year proposal was reduced to about £40m.
The minister also told the panel that proposed fees for missed appointments and the possible introduction of Emergency Department charges are about encouraging responsible use of services rather than raising revenue.
The panel heard that around one in ten hospital appointments are currently missed without notice, and that the proposed approach would apply a charge only after a second missed appointment in a year.
Deputy Binet confirmed there would be broad exemptions and appeals for those with valid reasons – such as “a family mishap” – and committed that charges would not be introduced until the department’s appointment systems are “robust”.
“What we don’t want to do is introduce something that ends in an illness or fatality because somebody’s been put off,” he said.
