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Solomon Hughes
April 2005
Medical experts and corporate advisers agree, patients will inevitably suffer
from the government’s agenda to expand choice in the NHS. By Solomon Hughes
The government’s NHS choice agenda sounds appetising, at least until you look at
the ingredients. I like my consumer choice as much as anyone and spend lots of
supermarket time deciding how to get my daily dose of Sudan 1. It seems the
government operates very similarly, turning to the retail industry to help it
fulfil its objectives. Stephen O’Brien, formerly a marketing director at
Kingfisher, the parent company of electrical retailer Comet and DIY store B&Q,
now runs the Department of Health’s marketing intelligence unit, helping
hospitals ‘sell’ their services in the new, competitive NHS.
The first step in the proposals is ‘choose and book’: GPs will offer patients a
choice of four different ‘providers’ for their treatment via a desktop computer
system. The government plans that at least one ‘choice’ will be from the private
sector. The British Medical Association (BMA) described this as ‘creeping
privatisation’, but thanks to a computer cock-up it is creeping very slowly. The
National Audit Office found that only 63 bookings were made through the computer
system instead of the 205,000 the government had projected.
The company originally hired to provide the computer system was
SchlumbergerSema, which also supplied the Labour Party’s membership system,
donated money to the party and paid for meetings with government ministers at
Labour’s annual conference. But after business failures SchlumbergerSema was
sold at a huge loss to another firm, Atos Origin, which now runs (or fails to
run) the choose-and-book computer system. Atos also has good political contacts:
former Labour cabinet minister Lord Barnett is chair of its UK operations.
The Department of Health is currently selecting the private firms that GPs will
be able to choose and book from. It intends to invest in private clinics and
hospitals, helping ensure healthy returns for their executives and shareholders.
Thus, Netcare, South Africa’s largest private hospital group, was contracted to
provide eye operations. South West Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust was bullied
into buying Netcare’s eye operations even though it already had a well-respected
NHS eye hospital in Oxford. A management consultants’ report commissioned by the
Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority, but kept secret until after the
Oxfordshire contract was signed, said the NHS hospital might be ‘destabilised’
by the deal; Netcare would cream off the more simple operations the hospital
traditionally supplied, starving it of money and training opportunities.
The consultants also said that the Oxfordshire contract would lead to ‘fewer
developmental opportunities for NHS trusts because of reduced investment’, and
that this would lead to ‘poorer services for patients’. But the consultants came
up with some brilliant recommendations for obviating 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.
To tempt private companies into this new market, they get higher fees per
operation than the NHS, to the inevitable detriment of the latter. To take just
one example, in 1999 Tony Blair opened an ‘ambulatory care and diagnostic
centre’ at London’s Central Middlesex Hospital, hailing the walk-in clinic as
‘amazing’ and ‘the embodiment of the new NHS’. The centre is now running at half
capacity and with the threat of closure hanging over its collective head. This
is simply because patients are being siphoned away by the private sector.
One of the private firms to have benefited from the government’s reforms is
Alliance Medical. The company sells MRI scans to the health service. As a
result, the NHS’s own scanners are lying idle and unused. Alliance secured the
£95m contract after one of the companies that part owns it, Bridgepoint Capital,
hired former health secretary Alan Milburn as an adviser (‘Healthy lucre’, Know
Your Enemy, July 2004). The contract has since been widely criticised by figures
within the medical establishment.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, Red Pepper uncovered papers showing that
the original idea for the MRI scan contract had come not from the government but
Alliance itself. The only difference between the deal that Alliance finally
secured and what it had at first proposed is that the company had also wanted to
provide endoscopies, and ultrasound and PET/CT scans. But good things come to
those who wait: now health secretary John Reid has announced plans for a £1
billion contract that would result in Alliance carrying out these services for
the NHS as well.
© Red Pepper
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/KYE/x-kye-July2004.html
KNOW YOUR ENEMY: Healthy lucre
Incompetence and bullying are no barriers to the private sector organisations
charged with running the NHS’s new fast-track hospitals.
The government has a new plan for the health service. Instead of paying private
firms to run the NHS, it is now paying private firms not to run the NHS. For
example, Mercury Health was the preferred bidder for a £300m contract to run
some of the new fast-track mini-hospitals known as Diagnostic and Treatment
Centres (DTCs). Mercury was to manage the ‘spine chain’ of fast-track hospitals
running from Nottinghamshire to Southampton. This year, however, the Department
of Health (DoH) decided that Mercury was not up to the job. The department
agreed to pay the company a figure it described as ‘below £2m’ as compensation
for its losing the deal.
A second DTC contract collapsed this April, when the government announced that
Anglo-Canadian was ‘deselected’ as the ‘preferred bidder’ to run fast-track
hospitals in London because it ‘could not offer value for money’. Like Mercury,
Anglo-Canadian is likely to be compensated for losing the contract.
None of this deterred health minister John Reid from offering yet more NHS
contracts to private firms. Alongside its compensation payment, Mercury got
another fast-track hospital contract as a consolation prize: the firm will be
running the southeast DTCs in Havant, Haywards Heath, Medway, Wycombe and
Portsmouth.
Mercury is a subsidiary of the Tribal Group, whose managing director is Mark
Smith. In 2002 Smith resigned as chief executive of the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS
Trust after auditors awarded its hospitals a ‘zero-star rating’. Smith left to
become ‘head of health’ for privatisation firm Amey, while his old trust had to
be taken over by a government ‘hit squad’.
Coincidentally, Amey’s Texan-born former director Ken Anderson ran the DTC
development programme for the NHS. Red Pepper asked the DoH whether the failure
of the Mercury and Anglo-Canadian DTC contracts was a black mark against
Anderson, who as the current head of NHS procurement is in charge of billions of
pounds of taxpayers’ cash.
A spokesperson responded: ‘We’re not going to respond to that.’ Anderson is less
tight-lipped. Last year he told assorted health executives that ‘Tony Blair is
the best Tory prime minister you ever had’.
After the 1997 election Labour said its privatisation programme would only
embrace ‘non-clinical’ parts of the NHS. The DTC scheme ends this promise, but
Labour actually started selling off clinical services much earlier. I recall
sitting in a fringe meeting at the 2000 Labour Conference, at which an angry
radiographer asked Alan Milburn why scanning services, although clearly
‘clinical’, were being privatised. The former health secretary did not answer.
Milburn now earns more than £25,000 a year as a consultant to Bridgepoint
Capital, part owner of Alliance Medical. Alliance rents out health scanners to
the NHS and is involved in a partnership with fellow private health firm Care UK
to run DTCs in the southwest.
One of Care UK’s directors is Sir Tim Chessells. The Carlton Club member was
chair of the North East Thames Regional Health Authority when it closed down a
swathe of London hospitals in the 1990s. The evidence of a 2002 industrial
tribunal suggests that Chessells may not have an entirely safe pair of hands.
The tribunal resulted in former nurse Kate Bleasdale winning a £2.2m settlement
from Match Holdings, the nursing agency she founded and on whose board Chessells
is a director. The money was compensation for sexual harassment and unfair
dismissal. Bleasdale claimed that Chessells was a ‘bully’ who ‘treated her with
ridicule and contempt’. In the small world of NHS privatisation, Match is
part-owned by Bridgepoint Capital, the firm now employing Alan Milburn.
Please See Also:
Know your enemy: Tony Blair
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/KYE/x-kye-May2004.html
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
Nemesis Peace Centre
http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.../protector.html
Abuse of Women and Children
http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/
Nemesis News
http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
Absolute Anarchy
http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/
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