U.K.: WHAT'S A FEW BILLION BETWEEN FRIENDS?

A new generation of hospitals will overshoot its original budget by at least 3.5 billion pounds because of unrealistic planning and expensive delays, The Times has learnt. Most hospital projects are running at more than double their projected cost. The spiralling overspending is being blamed on a lack of financial scrutiny by the Government and local health trusts.

The average bill for the 18 largest schemes under development has risen by 117 per cent. All of them started with budgets of at least 75 million pounds. The Department of Health said initially that all budgets predicted to overrun by more than 10 per cent would be appraised immediately. But action was taken only recently. The National Audit Office (NAO) will publish a damning critique today of a 1 billion pound project to build a health "campus" in Paddington, West London. After six years of planning, arguing and miscalculation, the project was cancelled last May, at a cost of 15 million, leaving the area with the same three rundown hospitals with which it started.

The report says that the failure was a lesson for everyone involved in the NHS's capital investment programme and illustrated the need for far more rigorous Government monitoring. Britain is building more large hospitals than all the other G7 nations put together. Economists are concerned that many will come into use just as annual NHS spending increases slow in 2008. The 300 million Paddington scheme, which involved the redevelopment of St Mary's, Harefield and the Royal Brompton, fell apart after its budget tripled and a proposed completion date slipped by seven years to 2013. The partners in the project could not acquire enough land, could not agree whether the scheme was affordable and planning eventually forecast a reduced demand for beds in the area.

Projects of a similar size are under way at the Royal London Hospital, Barts and in Birmingham and Leicester. Another 14, all worth more than 75 million, are running at more than double their initial budgets. About 5 billion worth of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) hospitals have been built or are under construction. The cost, which is "off-budget", is paid back by trusts over several decades. Another 6 billion of projects are out to tender and have had their strategic outline cases approved.

In January, after a government "reappraisal" of PFI costs, Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said that the future plans would be cut back by between 25 and 40 per cent. It is not yet known how such savings will be made. In the NAO report on the Paddington fiasco, the Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, highlighted fatal flaws missed by officials at local and national levels.

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Another attempted coverup in Queensland that is not going to work

It will all come out in court

A former whistleblower who was suspended after complaining about the treatment of people with disabilities at Brisbane's Basil Stafford Centre has been sacked. In February, The Courier-Mail reported that Kerry Crossingham, a residential care officer who worked with residents at the notorious facility, had been suspended on full pay since last July after alleging people with intellectual disabilities were being isolated and locked up for long periods. The treatment contravenes Disability Services Queensland's statutory requirements and policies.

Yesterday Mr Crossingham said he had received a letter of dismissal, the grounds for which included him harassing DSQ executive director Evan Klatt by sending emails relating to his complaints to Mr Klatt's home computer, and failing to follow a direction to supply his current home address to the department.

Mr Crossingham, who was nominated for an award for his work in 2004, said the Basil Stafford resident about whose treatment he had complained was still being "detained illegally". "They have no legal authorisation to lock him up and he is one of a number of intellectually disabled people whose liberty is currently being deprived illegally by DSQ," he said. "There is no statutory authority stating that residential care officers are authorised to lock these people up virtually, in some cases, in solitary confinement."

Mr Crossingham said he would take his case to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.

Source. More on the Basil Stafford Centre for the intellectually disabled here

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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. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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.

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