Last Tuesday, private health giants Capita and United Healthcare introduced themselves to London’s leading GPs with Andrew Lansley as matchmaker.
With the sinister language of a self-help book, the multinationals claimed the conference was “designed to ensure that Clinical Commissioning Groups are fully empowered, liberated and able to define their future.”
In fact, this was a shallow marketing exercise designed to woo the new masters of NHS into handing over large amounts of public money. The effect of the Health and Social Care Act will be to “liberate” the private health firms to make huge profits at the expense of patients and healthworkers.
It is estimated that since the Health and Social Care Act became law, Richard Branson’s Virgin Care has won over £1 billion of contracts.
The biggest contract is in community services in Surrey, but Virgin have also won contracts in Milton Keynes and Brighton and West Sussex.
Research by Eoin Clarke (Green Benches blog) shows that employees of Branson sat on the Clinical Commissioning Groups that awarded the contracts. Branson’s operation has positioned itself in certain areas to hold the NHS’s purse-strings and then has awarded contracts to itself. So much for patient choice and accountability!
West Riding Assura LLP (a subsidiary of Assura Medical, forerunner of Virgin Care) recently took action against North Yorkshire and York PCT after they failed to win a contract for musculo-skeletal services.
The case was taken to the Cooperation and Competition Panel for NHS Services (CCP) in late 2011. Ironically, they claimed that the NHS hospital’s bid was too low to deliver quality care. They also complained that the bid failed to protect patient choice as the hospital could refer elective patients to itself.
The CCP dismissed the first claim, showing that the NHS tends to be more efficient than its private sector competitors. However, they did uphold the second complaint about “patient choice”. It is not known whether legal action will follow but these aggressive tactics are just another layer of bureaucratic waste that bleeds the NHS and taxpayers’ money.
Serco’s £140 million contract for community services in Sussex made the headlines by coming just days after the Health and Social Care Act came into force.
Apart their record of running shoddy services in Cornwall that led to the avoidable death of a 6-year old boy, Serco is also emerging as a hostile union-bashing operation. Having taken over some auxillary services in Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital in 2009, they are refusing to talk to the unions and are trying to create a management-controlled “staff forum”.
Workers in the NHS must prepare to fight to stay in the NHS — the alternative is a race to the bottom on our terms and conditions, under aggressive business regimes that will set out to smash workers’ self-organisation.
