Feeling ill? Need an operation but bored with your local hospital?
The Department of Health now have a special marketing advice agency, the Insight Unit, to help hospitals sell their services. The NHS chief executive, Nigel Crisp, proclaimed that foundation trusts (SchNEWS 404) should adopt the same marketing techniques as Tesco in their bids to win customers in the new choice-based NHS market. Get ready to be treated like a tin of cheap beans Loyalty cards for the accident prone?
Of course its dressed up as patient choice, but this choice comes by opening the ward doors to more and more private companies who want to make a fast buck out of your illness. The first step to privatisation is Choose and Book: GPs will offer patients a choice of four different providers for their treatment via a desktop computer system, at least one of which has to be private. Luckily things could take a while as the IT contractors have made such a monumental screw-up of it (see SchNEWS 481) that this creeping privatisation, is, er, creeping very slowly.
Next up is the new NHS funding system Payment by Results. This involves hospitals being paid by primary care trusts for the work they actually do. A recent Audit Commission report said that the payment-by-results internal accounting system had turned out to be a more complex, time-consuming and challenging process than the NHS expected and could bring real dangers.
Also on the list are independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) who will be paid on average 40% more than NHS quacks, enabling them to cream off £3bn of taxpayers money. At present the DOH does not require the same level of training for doctors working in ISTCs, and six surgeons working for the private sector on NHS cases have already been suspended for what are termed serious surgical errors.
Meanwhile Primary Care Trusts continue to be privatised. Oxfordshire PCT will be the first in the country to be fully flogged off. Bidders include Group 4 (SchNEWS firm of the week), BUPA and the US health insurance company United Health. Maybe this is their reward for trying to block South African company Netcare taking over the countys eye operations. Since Oxford already had a well-respected NHS eye hospital, the Primary Trust refused to sign the contract with Netcare until it was bullied by health supremos into doing so. A management consultants report kept secret until after the contract was signed said the NHS hospital might be destabilised by the deal, as Netcare would cream off the more simple operations the hospital traditionally supplied, starving it of money (and payment by results), training opportunities and result in poorer services for patients.
However, the consultants did come up with some brilliant recommendations for sorting these problems: public sector health staff could gain experience working with Netcare for free; and the NHS should hawk surplus services in Wales and Scotland! Since the deal was done, Netcares Medical Director, Dinesh Verma, has resigned over patient safety concerns in its mobile surgical treatment centres.
Then theres the threat of closing failing NHS hospitals that cant attract enough paying customers. Not surprising really – as patients are coerced to go private, private companies then cherry-pick the easier, more lucrative work. Will we run out of patience before they run out of patients?
Government expenditure on the NHS is projected to rise an extra £20bn by 2008, so wheres the money going? Well, the last time there was a comparable increase in spending most of it went to pay the costs of the internal market reforms. Once again, most of the new money is going to foot the bills for bringing in the private sector. Cash that should be spent on frontline care will be diverted to making and monitoring hundreds of thousands of contracts, billing for every treatment and paying for accounting, auditing, legal services and advertising – not to mention shareholders profits. As Dr Jacky Davis a consultant radiologist in London pointed out We are not deceived by the rhetoric about patient choice and predict that patients may lose the one choice that is important – a good comprehensive local hospital. In a system where every part of the business must generate a surplus, patients will come second to profits. When the dictates of the market replace the public service ethos patients will suffer. The private sector will not support the NHS but compete with it, and NHS units and hospitals that cannot compete will close.
Feeling ill? Need an operation but bored with your local hospital?
The Department of Health now have a special marketing advice agency, the Insight Unit, to help hospitals sell their services. The NHS chief executive, Nigel Crisp, proclaimed that foundation trusts (SchNEWS 404) should adopt the same marketing techniques as Tesco in their bids to win customers in the new choice-based NHS market. Get ready to be treated like a tin of cheap beans Loyalty cards for the accident prone?
Of course its dressed up as patient choice, but this choice comes by opening the ward doors to more and more private companies who want to make a fast buck out of your illness. The first step to privatisation is Choose and Book: GPs will offer patients a choice of four different providers for their treatment via a desktop computer system, at least one of which has to be private. Luckily things could take a while as the IT contractors have made such a monumental screw-up of it (see SchNEWS 481) that this creeping privatisation, is, er, creeping very slowly.
Next up is the new NHS funding system Payment by Results. This involves hospitals being paid by primary care trusts for the work they actually do. A recent Audit Commission report said that the payment-by-results internal accounting system had turned out to be a more complex, time-consuming and challenging process than the NHS expected and could bring real dangers.
Also on the list are independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) who will be paid on average 40% more than NHS quacks, enabling them to cream off £3bn of taxpayers money. At present the DOH does not require the same level of training for doctors working in ISTCs, and six surgeons working for the private sector on NHS cases have already been suspended for what are termed serious surgical errors.
Meanwhile Primary Care Trusts continue to be privatised. Oxfordshire PCT will be the first in the country to be fully flogged off. Bidders include Group 4 (SchNEWS firm of the week), BUPA and the US health insurance company United Health. Maybe this is their reward for trying to block South African company Netcare taking over the countys eye operations. Since Oxford already had a well-respected NHS eye hospital, the Primary Trust refused to sign the contract with Netcare until it was bullied by health supremos into doing so. A management consultants report kept secret until after the contract was signed said the NHS hospital might be destabilised by the deal, as Netcare would cream off the more simple operations the hospital traditionally supplied, starving it of money (and payment by results), training opportunities and result in poorer services for patients.
However, the consultants did come up with some brilliant recommendations for sorting these problems: public sector health staff could gain experience working with Netcare for free; and the NHS should hawk surplus services in Wales and Scotland! Since the deal was done, Netcares Medical Director, Dinesh Verma, has resigned over patient safety concerns in its mobile surgical treatment centres.
Then theres the threat of closing failing NHS hospitals that cant attract enough paying customers. Not surprising really – as patients are coerced to go private, private companies then cherry-pick the easier, more lucrative work. Will we run out of patience before they run out of patients?
Government expenditure on the NHS is projected to rise an extra £20bn by 2008, so wheres the money going? Well, the last time there was a comparable increase in spending most of it went to pay the costs of the internal market reforms. Once again, most of the new money is going to foot the bills for bringing in the private sector. Cash that should be spent on frontline care will be diverted to making and monitoring hundreds of thousands of contracts, billing for every treatment and paying for accounting, auditing, legal services and advertising – not to mention shareholders profits. As Dr Jacky Davis a consultant radiologist in London pointed out We are not deceived by the rhetoric about patient choice and predict that patients may lose the one choice that is important – a good comprehensive local hospital. In a system where every part of the business must generate a surplus, patients will come second to profits. When the dictates of the market replace the public service ethos patients will suffer. The private sector will not support the NHS but compete with it, and NHS units and hospitals that cannot compete will close.
Check www.keepournhspublic.com for more on fighting hospital privatisation.