A 200 million pound government deal that will mean a big expansion of private sector involvement in the health service could provoke a confrontation with the unions and the Labour Left, The Times has learnt. The contracts with 14 independent companies, concluded last week by the Department of Health without any fanfare, will provide for an additional 150,000 elective procedures a year to be carried out for the health service by private firms.
The 14 companies will be added to the Department of Health’s “extended choice” network, which at present consists of foundation trusts and some independent treatment centres. Under the policy, patients awaiting elective care can choose from the list where they will be treated. Details of the deal are revealed in this week’s Health Service Journal.
Seven of the biggest private healthcare companies have won a large proportion of the work, with BMI Healthcare the big victor having 44 contracts across the country. Other winners include BUPA, Nuffield, Capio, Centres for Clinical Excellence, Mercury Health and Nations Healthcare. Each contract will run for five years and the private companies will provide NHS patients with a range of elective care services including general surgery, endoscopy, ophthalmology, plastic surgery and neurology. The health department has opted for centralised bulk buying to give the NHS more advantageous terms.
The contracts were not announced last week by the Health Department, prompting suspicions among health service professionals that the Government did not wish to highlight the move before the TUC and Labour conferences, where private sector provision remains controversial. But the department suggested yesterday that there was nothing unusual about an announcement not having been made. A spokesman said: “This is not a new procurement but part of the second wave of procurement from the independent sector which was launched in May last year.”
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Unending public hospital woes in Australia
Having a heart attack? You too have to wait!
This the anguished face of Queensland's health system. A woman waits with her elderly dad in an ambulance in a car park because he can't be admitted to the overflowing emergency department. At least five other patients wait in other ambulances. A year after the health inquiry and just a day after Premier Peter Beattie denied there was a crisis in the health system, Cairns Base Hospital yesterday was a scene of agony. As politicians from all sides of politics pledge to fix the problems in health, 70-year-old Ken Freckelton waited nearly two hours to be admitted to the hospital suffering chest pains.
His worried daughter Emma Freckelton-Bowden watched helplessly as paramedics were told there were no spare beds. After finally being admitted he was returned to the ambulance because there were no spare doctors. "Nobody would come and talk to us to tell us what was happening. They were talking to the paramedics telling them there were no beds," Ms Freckelton-Bowden said.
The gridlock was revealed as Coalition deputy leader Bruce Flegg stood outside the hospital unveiling a plan to expand cardiac services. Dr Flegg said the situation was a "disgrace" and left just after his press conference as media crews spoke to distraught relatives.
Cairns Health Service District Acting Manager Brett Grosser blamed the situation on an influx of patients needing beds with cardiac-monitoring equipment. "(That) meant some patients had to wait in the ambulances until these monitored beds became available," Mr Grosser said. He said this week had been particularly busy for the hospital's Emergency Department (ED). "We can't predict when ambulances will need to wait," he said. A spokesman for the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, which includes ambulance officers, said backlogs at the hospital potentially led to delays in responding to other cases.
Australian Medical Association Queensland president Zelle Hodge said the hospital's emergency department was not big enough and had too few beds to cope with the demand. She said the problem of bed numbers in Queensland hospitals was compounded in the mid-1990s under the then Goss Government when Mr Beattie was Health Minister. Dr Hodge said instead of increasing bed numbers or maintaining them, they were cut. "The health economists at the time were saying: 'You're not going to need as many hospital beds because basically people are going to be in for a shorter stay'," she said. "But the doctors were saying: 'People are getting older, the population is getting bigger. Even though people are in for a shorter time, you're still going to need those bed numbers'." Dr Hodge said she was at a meeting last year when the Premier admitted he had thought those doctors were "empire building" and realised now he was wrong not to trust them
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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?
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