Letter from Mark Langabeer, Hastings and Rye Labour member.
As Panorama revealed this week, there are concerns about the use of private clinics and hospitals for routine operations, even as the Government is increasingly using the private sector to try to reduce waiting times.
The programme reporter, Monika Plaha, interviewed a number of relatives who had lost loved ones when it was subsequently thought that their deaths were avoidable. The main problem is that most private hospitals don’t have Critical Care Units, so if a procedure goes wrong, the private hospital has to call for on an ambulance to transfer the patient to an NHS hospital. A private hospital is required to say whether it has a critical care unit, but one relative said that they were never informed about the lack of a CCU.
Plaha reported on Spire, one of the largest private healthcare providers, after the scandal involving a consultant who was conducting unnecessary surgery on patients. It was found that a number of women were wrongly diagnosed with cancer and, as a result, Spire were forced to pay over £50 mn in compensation.
Another safety concern is the number of hours that resident doctors are contracted to work. Many of them are equivalent to junior doctors in the NHS and Panorama revealed that they could end up working 168 hours a week, whereas their colleagues in the NHS are required to work no more than 48 hours. Spire also employs resident doctors from overseas who have just qualified and are left unsupervised during the evenings.
Panorama obtained a number of testimonies from doctors, stating that they were often tired and that safety could compromised. The daughter of one of the patients who died noted that there were few staff available during evenings.
Another concern of many healthcare professionals is the creation of a two-tier system, whereby those with relatively simple procedures are swiftly dealt with by the private sector, while more complex operations, involving more staff, over a longer time, and with more after care, are done by the NHS. So the private sector are creaming off the ‘low-hanging fruit’, while the more expensive treatments are paid by the NHS.
I felt that one of the weaknesses of the programme was that it gave no details of the costs borne by the NHS in contracting out procedures to the private sector, which is primarily concerned with making profits. Plaha reported that Spire’s profits were £126mn last year, 30 per cent up on the previous year.
Spire and other private health providers are seeking to increase operations in areas that have a greater degree of complexity, like cardiology and neurology, and the Tories have always been wedded to the idea that private is better than public. Unfortunately, if the recent utterances of the Labour front bench are anything to go by Labour will not be ending the practice of farming out operations to the private sector, and they may well increase it.
The lack on investment in the NHS has meant a huge increase in waiting lists for all kinds of operations and procedures. Patients often have to waitsuch a long time that their condition can deteriorate. Waiting lists have never been so great in the whole history of the NHS. The only way to cut waiting times is a massive investment programme, along with an end to private sector involvement in our NHS.
The Panorama programme is still available on BBC i-player and can be found here.
