BRITAIN: THE SOCIALISTS ARE GRADUALLY GIVING UP!

They are turning more and more to service providers outside their hopeless NHS. They already export some patients to France!

Private companies have been secretly assured more than £1 billion of NHS money to take over the running of GP services as part of a government drive to encourage the independent sector into primary health care. Senior Whitehall officials had a closed meeting this month where they outlined plans to ring-fence 10 per cent of health trusts’ primary care budgets for contracts with private companies.

The move coincides with another policy change, expected in a White Paper this year, which will allow companies that invest in building local health centres also to provide healthcare for the community. The plans, reported in Doctor magazine today, have been criticised as further evidence of the Government’s desire to “privatise the NHS by stealth”. Health professionals have described the policy shift as a worrying indication that primary care — widely regarded as the foundation stone of the NHS — was going to be opened up for exploitation by private investors. The Government has angered traditionalists by allowing companies to move into secondary care, where they receive NHS money to provide treatment centres for services such as orthopaedic and cataract operations.

The latest drive came at the meeting in the House of Commons this month, when private companies and investment banks were addressed by Stephen O’Brien, the Department of Health’s strategy director, and Ken Anderson, its commercial director. The officials said that the treatment centre model was “very much the starting point for the direction we now wish to travel in.” They added that the department would be “ring-fencing 10 per cent of (primary care trust) budgets for innovative programmes”. These programmes involve a mechanism introduced by ministers last year known as alternative provider medical services (APMS), which allows trusts to pay private companies for services, such as maternity and diabetes care and out-of-hours GP cover, if there is a shortage in the area.

Ministers have been disappointed, until now, that private companies have shown only a limited interest in taking up the challenge. But with assurance of 10 per cent of the annual £12 billion primary care budget, attitudes in the private sector are expected to change. Documents used by the Department of Health to brief private investors, seen by The Times, reveal other incentives planned to win over the independent sector. The Government’s Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) scheme, which encourages companies to invest in building and refurbishing large GP centres, is likely be changed to allow them also to provide healthcare.

The LIFT scheme has raised concerns that it is bringing in large, impersonal “super- surgeries” at the expense of more personal GP care. Allyson Pollock, Professor of Public Health at University College London, said she feared that the new drive would be a catastrophe for public health. Describing the plans as the end of family medicine, Professor Pollock said that GPs had to wake up before they became the “salaried employees of large, for-profit organisations

The Times



AND NOTE FURTHER:

The idea of the independent sector running a GP’s surgery might be anathema to Labour’s traditionalists, but in the Prime Minister’s Sedgefield consituency a private company already works at the heart of the NHS. Last December a practice in Hallgarth was taken over by IntraHealth, a private company working for the NHS. IntraHealth employs all the Hallgarth staff, including the three GPs, who have relinquished their self- employed status. The company delivers primary-care services to the practice’s 6,000 patients in Shildon, Co Durham.

Nigel Porter, the chief executive of Sedgefield primary care trust, said that the practice had been given “personal medical service” status and therefore also the freedom to choose whether to continue to be run by the primary care trust or to hand the responsibility to someone else. He said that GPs had wanted to make the most of the management experience that the company could offer, so that they could concentrate on medical services.

The NHS Confederation, which represents primary care trusts, said that more contracts between GPs and private providers were likely because trusts and practices wanted value for money and financial security. IntraHealth also has links with some of the 11 other practices in Sedgefield and has been involved in a scheme involving private pharmacists. Another company, ChilversMcCrea Healthcare, runs 13 surgeries in Essex, London and Sussex

The Times

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here, the mirror site may be more up to date. My Home Page is here or here.

***************************