chris hopson revealed that there were more than 90 thousand posts unfilled in the nhs and stressed thecrease year on year. the treasury and the department of health are locking horns on how to deal with the funding crisis — as chris cook reports, marking the birthday could be very expensive for the government. a hectic day indeed for both patients... as the nhs draws in on its 70th birthday, it's not in good health. the health service is expected to get some kind of fresh funding settlement this summer, and boy, does it need it. in 2016/17, that is the year before last, hospitals in england ran a pretty big deficit. they spent £791 million more than their income. iin the past year, 2017/18, the plan was to rein that in, back to £196 million. but today, we learned things had slipped backwards, hospitals overspent by almost £1 billion. that is way more than planned, and that number actually flatters them. what we've got now is £800 million worth of one off savings made this year, to get us to the £1 billion deficit figure, so those one off savings by definition can't be made year after y