Union demands investigation into 'obscene' NHS profits

The UK’s biggest trade union today called for an investigation into what it branded as “obscene” profits being made by private firms from the NHS.

Unison said a “black hole” was opening up in the health service’s finances because of the millions of pounds being made by companies.

The union published a report it described as a “damning expose” of damage being done by untested hospital reforms.

The union claimed that changes were being imposed on the NHS, leading to a more competitive approach to running the service.

General secretary Dave Prentis said: “We are calling for time-out on the ever increasing use of the private sector in our NHS.

“The government is allowing multinationals to bleed the NHS dry, which is bad news for patients and taxpayers. These companies are destabilising our NHS and leading to widespread financial problems.

“Wards and whole hospitals are threatened with closure, the jobs of nurses and health workers are disappearing. Newly qualified nurses and therapists are unemployed and desperate to put their training into practice.”

Mr Prentis said £5bn (€7.4bn) was going into Private Sector Treatment Centres which were at the root of the problems, adding: “We have the obscene situation of NHS scanners and equipment lying idle while Trusts struggle to survive under the ’payment by results system’, never knowing what their income will be.

“No-one can manage finances effectively if they don’t know how much money is coming in, so how can the Government expect hospital managers to balance the books?

“Hospitals must now compete against each other and have been told by government to spend some of their precious budget on advertising for patients.

“Before the market gets a stranglehold on the NHS, we want a halt to privatisation and an independent review into the impact of the market on the NHS.”

The report detailed a number of private sector “gains” at the expense of the NHS, including redundancies and problems finding jobs for newly qualified nurses, midwives and physiotherapists.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: “The government has been extending the role of the private sector as part of a rushed package of reforms, which have introduced powerful forces into the NHS without any assessment of the impact on patient care.

“There are still many unanswered questions about private provision in the NHS. Why do private treatment centres get more money than NHS hospitals for carrying out similar procedures?

“How are cash-strapped NHS hospitals meant to deal with the extra financial instability that will result from patients being treated in private independent treatment centres?

“There is a useful role for private sector involvement in healthcare, but the emphasis must be on sharing best practice through co-operation, not competition.”

However, health minister Ivan Lewis said the Unison report was “misleading and factually inaccurate”.

He said: “If private organisations can help the NHS deliver better services for patients and better value for taxpayers, we will use them. If they can’t, we won’t.

“Our goal is simple – the best possible health service, tax-funded, free at the point of need.

“Independent provision brings extra capacity and efficiency, for example in cataract operations where the maximum wait is now at a record low of three months, often far less.

“More than 250,000 NHS patients to date have either been treated by or received a diagnostic service faster then they would have otherwise done thanks to the independent sector.

“It’s also nonsense to suggest that the jobs of nurses and health workers are disappearing.

“The latest official redundancy returns show that of the 903 compulsory redundancies, regrettable though this is, only 136 were clinical staff, and overall the number of staff employed by the NHS has expanded by 306,000 between September 1997 and September 2005.”