Posted on 2015-01-18 | 05:46

Roger has tabled a series of Early Day Motions and Parliamentary Questions to protest the damaging effects on patient care of the privatisation and fragmentation of the National Health Service.

The EDMs draw attention to the problems which occur when private companies are allowed to cherry-pick those NHS services they believe they can make a profit from, then send patients back to the NHS when things go wrong. Private health company Vanguard won a contract to provide cataract surgery to Musgrove Park Hospital, which was forced to terminate the contract after more than half of the patients who underwent surgery suffered from serious complications, which the NHS then had to treat at taxpayer expense. The injured patients are now forced to take legal action against Vanguard.

Commented Roger: “If NHS patients were aware that having their surgery done by a private company which had been subcontracted by the NHS was more likely to result in complications, they simply would not agree to undergo surgery at a private hospital. It is unacceptable that people’s health and even lives are being put at risk by the failed experiment of privatisation. It is simply not possible for private health companies to make what they regard as an acceptable profit from NHS contracts unless they undercut on safety standards and provision for emergency care, leaving the NHS to pick up the pieces when companies provide poor or dangerous care.

“In 2012-13, there were more than 2,600 emergency admissions to the NHS from the private sector. These private companies take the money for carrying out surgery then dump patients back on the NHS when complications occur. This means that the shareholders make a fat profit at the expense of the UK taxpayer and of their patients’ well-being. The NHS should, at the very least, have the powers to recoup costs resulting from private contractors’ ineptitude.”

The safety record of private hospitals is extremely worrying. Figures obtained from the Care Quality Commission show that just over 800 patients died unexpectedly in private hospitals in England between October 2010 and April 2014, and there were more than 900 serious injuries. Yet because private health companies are not subject to the same transparency and disclosure rules as the NHS, it is impossible to carry out a like-for-like comparison on statistics such as death rates and infections to see just how much more dangerous private hospitals are than those run by the national health service. In the EDMs Roger tabled, he calls for the same level of scrutiny, regulation and protection of patients' safety to be applied to private patients as currently exist for NHS patients.

Roger said: “The recent Hinchingbrooke Hospital disaster shows the effects of privatising the NHS. Hichingbrooke was the first hospital to be privatised, and Circle Group pulled out of the contract when it found it to be insufficiently profitable. Unlike the NHS, private companies have a duty to maximise shareholder profits and will therefore prioritise this over patient wellbeing and public health”.

Roger’s EDMs highlight the fact that Circle Group has previous form in making a mess of NHS contracts. The group took over Bedfordshire's £120 million Musculoskeletal Service, which led to a 30 per cent reduction in referrals to the Bedford Hospital Trust. This undermined not only the ability of the A&E department to see and admit trauma patients, but also the Trust’s ability to pay and retain consultants. Nottingham University Hospitals Trust will no longer be able to provide acute adult dermatology, including skin cancer and emergency care after losing six of its eight consultants. Five of these consultants left rather than transfer to Circle over concerns about job security and that a profit-driven provider would not offer opportunities for academic research or training.

Roger continued: “The NHS is already an extremely cost-effective way of providing healthcare. By allowing private companies to get their greedy hands on NHS contracts, less money will be spent on healthcare and more will be wasted on management and advertising costs, not to mention on profits. Why should a single penny of UK taxpayers’ money—which should be spent on healthcare—be wasted on fattening investors’ shareholder value or corporate returns? Citizens have a right to demand that their taxes are spent on public services, not wasted on fattening greedy, incompetent corporations which lack any concern for public health or patient safety.”

Roger also tabled Written Parliamentary Questions to ask the Government what proportion of GP practices are privately owned and what research has been done into the differences in quality—such as survival rates and waiting times—between privately owned and NHS GP practices. He also asked how much admissions to the NHS from private hospitals which could not cope with emergencies are costing the NHS, and what proportion of private health companies which have taken on GP contracts have left the contract early when they found that it was not sufficiently profitable, sometimes leaving citizens with no local GP service. To all of these questions, the Department of Health’s answer was the same: it “does not hold this information centrally”.

Said Roger: “It is extremely worrying that the Department of Health is not fulfilling its responsibility to collect data on the effects of the decision to privatise many vital parts of the NHS. If the Government do not require data to be collected to enable the results of privatisation to be examined, how will MPs or doctors be able to compare the safety and value for money of private versus public provision?

“If the Government insist on continuing with a policy of privatisation which has so far been utterly disastrous, it should at the very least bother to collect data to compare the two modes of provision. That the Government decline to do so leads to the suspicion that Ministers at the Department are reluctant to subject the performance of private healthcare companies which take on NHS contracts to proper public and parliamentary scrutiny. I believe that to do so would clearly show that the NHS is the more cost-effective and safer way of providing good quality public healthcare, and would therefore destroy any arguments in favour of privatisation and fragmentation.”