Private treatment putting
huge strain on the NHS
patients and services if contracts
are terminated early by independent
providers.
With the NHS needing to achieve £22bn in
annual efficiency savings, the BMA states
that it cannot afford to be left to pick up the
bill from failures of private providers.
The BMA argues that it supports a publicly
funded and publicly provided NHS. Where
independent sector providers are already
delivering NHS services, the priority should
be for them to support the NHS to deliver
high quality services.
It was recently reported in the news that around 6,000 patients
a year need NHS care after private treatment. Reporting on
a document published by the British Medical Association last
month, the Mirror stated that thousands of patients are having to
be admitted to NHS hospitals after suffering from treatment that
has gone wrong in private hospitals and that private hospitals ‘are
of ten not equipped to deal with complications from surgery’.
According to the Mirror, 2,500 of these
patients are ‘emergency’ cases who have
to be rushed to the nearest NHS hospital
and medics fear some private hospitals
‘lack the facilities to deal with emergencies
if things go wrong’ and rely on the NHS ‘to
act as a safety net’.
It is reported that private hospitals
now carry out one in five hip and knee
replacements for the NHS at a cost of
around £6,000 each. But many have no
intensive care beds and sometimes lack
key medical cover when mistakes occur.
The Independent recently reported the
findings of the Centre for Health and the
Public Interest, a leading medical thinktank, who found that between 2010 and
2014, 800 patients, including those referred
by the NHS, died unexpectedly in private
hospitals. It also documented several
cases where mistakes had been made by
private hospitals but not detected until up
to a year later. In one incident, surgeons
had replaced the wrong knee joint on three
separate patients.
The Mirror reports that Dr Clive Peedell
says the NHS is being run for the benefit
of private providers. Medics are becoming
increasingly worried that independent
providers are “leaving the NHS to deal
with any complications,” according to the
25-page report. “As we can conclude from
this report’s findings, it is more to do with
taking the profitable parts of the NHS and
parcelling them up to be tendered to the
private sector. “This will standardise the
situation we are seeing now, where the
private sector performs profitable routine
surgery and passes them straight to the
public sector when emergencies arise.”
According to the BMA’s report, the most
common reasons for the concern from
those surveyed is that private provision
destabilises and fragments NHS services.
The report also found that doctors
believe that the primary motivation for
some private sector providers is profit,
rather than providing the highest possible
standard of care for patients.
According to the BMA website, the key
findings of the report include:
• More than two-thirds (67 per cent) of
doctors are fairly or very uncomfortable
with private providers delivering NHS
services, with the most common
concerns being that it destabilises and
fragments NHS services;
• In 2014/15, £6.9bn was spent on
procuring services from independent
sector providers, which is a 5.4 per cent
annual increase;
• The report recommends that private
providers should be held to the same
standards as NHS providers including
transparent reporting of patient safety
incidents and performance;
• The report recommends that safeguards
should be introduced to protect NHS
Dr Mark Porter, BMA council chair, said:
“At a time when the NHS is facing huge
financial pressure, more attention needs
to be paid to private sector provision of
NHS services to assess whether it provides
value for money, high-quality, safe care
to patients, as well as the impact it has
on other NHS services. The NHS exists
to provide the highest quality care for its
patients. Anyone who doesn’t accept that,
or gets in the way of achieving it, should not
be allowed near it. That’s true for anyone
who works in the health service, and it’s
also true for any individual or company
providing services within it. Patient care
simply cannot take second place to
finances. In an era of declining funding,
rising patient demand and staff shortages,
we need a new way forward that addresses
the challenges facing our NHS.”
According to the Mirror, private health
concerns bank almost £19million a
day from the NHS budget. In 2014/15,
£6.9billion was taken from the NHS
coffers to pay private health providers for
treatment of NHS patients – a rise of 5.4%
on the year before and double the 2.4%
increase in overall NHS spending.
Heath Secretary Jeremy Hunt has
defended the role of private firms. But
doctors fear independent providers may
be putting patients at risk by safeguarding
profits, which leads to cash being sucked
out of the NHS.
This report comes at a time when Mayo
Wynne Baxter are seeing an increase in
the number of clients who have been the
victims of private negligent treatment, and
the findings of this report no doubt offer
some explanation as to why that may be.
The strain being placed on the private
sector by the increase in demand, along
with the pressure from the NHS and the all
too common existence of private providers
being driven by finances, rather than the
well-being of their patients sadly means
an overall increase in medical negligence
claims.
By Hannah Baty
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