Both Labour and TUC conterences have now voted tirmly against government plans to buy care from private treatment centres. The latest round involves purchasing further 250,000 operations a year.
And NHS facilities built with taxpayers' money,
funded expensively through the Private Finance Initiative at the expense of the NHS — are to be handed over to private sector operaLOLD.
The policy will push the private sector share of the NHS budget for waiting list treatment up to around 15 percent - forcing NHS cuts and closures.
• A brand new state of the art NHS Treatment Centre in Birmingham, not even yet open, is to be handed
• Also facing privatisation is a specialist unit in the new PFI-financed New Forest hospital in Lymington.
• Other modern NHS treatment centres, including Ravenscourt Park Hospital in NW London and the SW London Elective Orthopaedic Centre in Epsom, also face privatisation.
In South Yorkshire NHS catheter laboratories in Rotherham and Barnsley could be handed over as part of a cardiology contract:
• "Spare surgical capacity" in NHS hospitals in the South West Peninsula could also be made available for private companies carrying out, NHS-funded operations.
• A huge renal dialysis contract, covering much of the north of England could see dozens of NHS units handed over for private operators to refurbish and run for profit.
The expansion of the private sector at the expense of the NHS could not have occurred without government sponsorship.
Ministers have deliberately expanded private sector provision - knowing it will drain resources from the NHS. The most recent tendering documents make no bones about the long term plan:
"A key factor in this Plan is the Independent Sector (IS) Procurement Programme, the purpose of which is to provide additional capacity, expand new ways of working and develop a sustainable IS market. Privatisation
And to make it quite clear that the driving force is privatisation and marketisation rather than expanding capacity, the reduction of waiting lists comes third in the Department of Health's three "primary objectives", AFTER the creation of a sustainable private sector and "contestability" (1.e. competition).
The document asserts that competition will somehow "improve productivity and value for money in NHSrun services".
fact the Treatment Centre contracts do not involve any competition with the NHS: the contracts are centrally negotiated and funded, and the cash is ringfenced so that only the private sector can apply -NHS hospitals are excluded.
There has been no evaluation of the effectiveness or value for money of these
One scheme involves bringing in specialist eye surgeons and nursing staff from South Africa to deliver routine cataract operations
patients in Oxfordshire. It could bankrupt the existing Oxford Eye Hospital, and jeopardise its other services: there is no evidence that paying up to 40% more to commission these services privately (rather than allowing the NHS to implement its previous plans to deliver improved waiting times) will do anything but undermine NHS efficiency.
Similar questions hang over the scheme that is due to slice off 85% of the orthopaedic caseload from the Brighton Sussex Hospital, and instead purchase £18m of NHS treatment year from
Staffing restrictions
on the new private
units have been eased - allowing NHS
staff, like NHS cash, to 'follow the patients' into the private sector newly-created private treatment centre. A similar crisis is unfolding at Oxford's Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, another NHS unit which has lost a large part of its elective contract to the newly-expanded private treatment centre a mile away: the Nuffield is now facing a closure of half its surgical beds, and long-term financial dislocation, just months after completing a costly PFI-funded expansion. In each case, the NHS is left with only the most costly and complex cases and emergency work, raising that danger that NHS units could be rendered financially non-viable by the treatment centre programme.
Their closure would not only reduce choice for NHS patients (and create a virtual private sector monopoly) but also force those needing any more complex or urgent treatment to travel many miles to an NHS alternative. Lavish subsidies
To foster an expansion of private care, ministers have offered private hospitals very generous Coulialls. paying up to 40% above the prevailing costs within the
lavish subsidies towards start-up costs for new private hospitals, and guaranteed payment even for those private providers who treat fewer patients than planned.
The new round of tendering offers slightly less generOUS subsidies private hospitals, but promises the extra security of five-year contracts for the winners, while also relaxing the initial restrictions on poaching NHS staff to help run the new private units.
The Department's own document explains that new schemes have gone well beyond the notion of expanding NHS capacity, and are now seeking to transfer existing NHS work to private treatment centres.
This is the pretext under which the staffing restrictions on the new private units have been eased allowing staff, like NHS cash, to 'follow the patients' into the private sector, but also making it easier to employ trained professional staff even where there is no transfer of activity.