Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Foundations hit by market forces

Socialist Resistance no44  |  page 6

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

There is now official confirmation that New Labour's new competitive market system could kill off local NHS services.

It comes from recent statements by Bill Moyes, chair of Monitor, the regulatory body supposed to keep track of Foundation Trusts.

He and Monitor are urging Foundations to act more like any other business, and to reexamine the financial situation of each of the services they provide, regarding each service as a "profit centre", and ruthlessly discarding those services which do not offer sufficient return on investment.

The aim, Moyes told the Financial Times Nick Timmins, was to "understand profitability, efficiency and quality - and to strike the right balance between the three" (March 12)

Hospitals should in his view be "behaving like any other business". As a result, said Mr Moyes "The time may come when foundation trusts may be able to walk away from a service, provided we are confident that the primary care trust has alternative suppliers." -And of course if this is the logic behind services continuing or closing, there can be no guarantee any unprofitable - or less profitable - service could be maintained whether or not a local Primary Care Trust has an alternative provider to turn to.