- All Integrated Care Boards must include private healthcare company decision makers on the board
- All NHS healthcare contracts to be offered to private healthcare companies as determined by the 42 private healthcare ICB members.
- NHS to be integrated with private healthcare companies in England to ensure privatisation of the NHS
- At least £20 billion from NHS budget to be handed to private healthcare companies
- Cancer treatment and all diagnostic services (X-ray / MRI /CT Scans) to be fully transferred to the “ independent sector”
- Fragmented NHS creates huge challenges to patient safety and quality of healthcare as treatments - e.g Cataract surgery - are handed over to the private sector
Jenny Green of Calderdale And Kirklees 999 Call For The NHS campaign group writes:
The government and its corporate cronies are carrying out a massive privatisation of planned surgery and diagnostics that not only takes £20bn over five years away from NHS hospitals and hands the dosh to profiteering private companies – it will install private health companies as NHS Integrated Care Board partners in joint planning and delivery of planned health care services – even handing whole cancer and diagnostics pathways over to them.
This year the government will use secondary legislation added to the contentious 2022 Health and Care Bill, to integrate the private sector with the NHS by new “Provider Selection Regime” regulations, outside normal procurement law, that require NHS commissioning organisations to increase contracts with private companies.
Polls show this is not what the public wants, with good reason.
A government taskforce stuffed with private healthcare companies and lobbyists has come up with ways of driving NHS elective care patients to treatment carried out by private hospitals and clinics. It has also announced changes to contract and procurement processes to make sure NHS organisations buy more elective services from private companies.
In order to allow ‘qualified’ private health care companies and third sector organisations increased access to NHS clinical services contracts, outside formal public procurement rules, new legislation this year will set up the ‘Provider Selection Regime’ that was proposed in the contentious 2022 Health and Care Act.
A sentence in Schedule 2 of the 2022 Health and Care Act purports to prevent private companies from “underminining the independence of the health service”, by excluding anyone likely to do so from NHS Integrated Care Board membership. But the government’s Elective Recovery Task force proposes “joint strategic planning partnerships” between private health care companies and Integrated Care Boards.
The Taskforce also proposes Integrated Care Boards’ handover of entire pathways to private companies. NHS England says ICBs will transfer some cancer pathways and diagnostics to “the independent sector”.
The prospect of a large, long term stream of NHS money is luring more private equity companies to invest in private health care corporations, in the expectation of extracting substantial profits.
But this is not what the public wants – an openDemocracy poll carried out while the Health and Care Bill was being debated in Parliament in 2021 has found that three quarters of the public feared that greater use of private healthcare companies by the NHS would cause a decline in standards and loss of funding to NHS hospitals.
And the Royal College of Ophthalmologists has pointed out that where elective care has already been substantially privatised, such as cataract surgery, this has created “challenges to long term sustainable patient care”. While the fragmentation of service delivery across multiple providers means additional patient safety and service quality safeguards are needed.
For the proof of what a privatised healthcare system, because that is what the NHS is being turned into; we just need to look at what happened when Covid-19 hit the UK.
In their disaster capitalist response to the pandemic, which led to a massive public health failure with over a quarter of a million deaths – and still rising, the government and its corporate cronies cut out GPs, local authority public health departments, and NHS pathology laboratories from their roles in patient care, in reporting, testing, tracking and tracing a notifiable disease, and in analysis of tests for a notifiable disease.
Now the same system is being used to bypass GPs and Cancer specialists as all Cancer diagnostic services are being handed over to the private healthcare sector!
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