News OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Maggie Nelmes, Ventnor. Ed
Both Conservative and Labour healthcare leads, Victoria Atkins and Wes Streeting, are presenting the use of private hospitals for NHS surgery as a harmless and necessary temporary measure to cut waiting lists.
However, last Monday evening’s BBC Panorama exposed the risks to patients of being sent to private hospitals, which have no intensive care units or proper night cover. If there are complications after surgery, patients can die.
According to a recent Oxford University study,
“Outsourcing (NHS services to private companies) has been associated with an additional 557 deaths across 173 of England’s clinical commissioning groups.”
Moreover, private hospitals send some 550 patients back to the NHS every month, known as “A&E dumping”, while they profit from the easy cases. Cherry-picking patients enables them to maximise their profits.
Hobbs: NHS has gone from being world-leading to on its knees
In an article addressed to Labour’s Wes Streeting, published in labourlist.com, Cat Hobbs, director of the campaign group We Own It, says:
“Under the Conservatives, our NHS has gone from being world-leading to on its knees. In 2014, a Commonwealth Fund study ranked the NHS as the best healthcare system in the world and the second cheapest of those analysed. Today, 250 patients are dying every week because of long waits in A&E. Doctors are leaving the country in droves. Hospitals are literally crumbling.”
Pouring precious NHS funds into private companies is NOT going to achieve Labour’s goals of restoring the NHS.
NHS privatised in many different ways
The Oxford study finds that it has been privatised in many different ways. These are the main outcomes:
- The internal market wastes at least £4.5 billion a year;
- PFI contracts drain away up to 13% of NHS trust budgets;
- Outsourcing by NHS trusts has led to 557 excess deaths since the 2012 Health and Social Care Act;
- Outsourcing by NHS England has wasted many £millions on failed contracts, such as Test and Trace and PPE during the Covid pandemic.
Even in the short-term, says Cat Hobbs,
“Using the private sector is “a far less effective solution than immediately ramping up investment in NHS capacity and paying NHS staff better so they don’t feel the need to take on second jobs.”
Link between outsourcing and poorer quality care
Not only does the Oxford University analysis show a link between outsourcing and poorer quality care for patients, but it also shows the decline of staff-to-patient ratios and the rejection of patients with more serious and less profitable conditions.
This comes as no surprise to those familiar with the privatised model of healthcare in the US, one of the most expensive and least efficient healthcare services in the world, paid for through expensive private insurance policies, which nevertheless do not guarantee treatment for costly long-term conditions.
By sending 550 of their patients back to the NHS every month between 2016 and 2021, private hospitals have:
- wasted NHS trusts’ tight financial resources, worsening the care available to patients in NHS hospitals, and
- undermined the NHS’s ability to train more doctors to fill the many vacancies, as the private hospitals take on the easy surgery that the NHS doctors trains its doctors on.
Spending NHS money on private hospitals builds up and strengthens private healthcare, while weakening the NHS. This throws the doors to two-tier healthcare in Britain wide open.
Sign the petition
Please sign We Own It’s petition to Wes Streeting (Labour) and Victoria Atkins (Conservative), asking them to invest in the NHS, not in private healthcare companies End Private Healthcare Deaths: Invest in the NHS | We Own It
