The privatisation of the NHS is both alarming and complicated. Alarming, because a service run for private profit is a real threat to the principle of universal healthcare, free at the point of use. Complicated, partly because of the convoluted legislative changes that allow it to happen, partly because it's a gradual, piecemeal process and partly because the Tories deny it's happening at all. Finchley and Golders Green MP Michael Freer recently tweeted to a constituent "No-one is privatising the NHS. Complete tosh"
Helpfully, the website www.nhsforsale.info sets the record straight. It tracks the evidence of NHS privatisation: the 358 GP surgeries now run by Virgin Care, for example, or the details by sector of the 135 NHS services put out to tender since April.
However, the section I want to zoom in on in this blog post is the links between Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and private health care firms. By way of background, CCGs were established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. They include all the GP groups in the area and manage primary care in that area. They command £60 billion and decide which services should be commissioned, or bought by the NHS. This includes elective hospital care, rehabilitation care, urgent and emergency care, most community health services and mental health and learning disability services. This process is right at the heart of the creeping privatisation of the NHS.
Yet a survey by the British Medical Journal in March 2013 found that 36% of doctors with a place on one of the CCG boards had shares in private health companies, others were senior directors of those same companies. Now to be fair, board members are required to register their financial interests and leave the meeting when a conflict of interest comes up. Even so, as this list of conflicts of interest that have arisen on the 'NHS for sale' website shows, real concerns persist that decisions will be made not in the interest of patients' health but that of private profit.
Helpfully, the website www.nhsforsale.info sets the record straight. It tracks the evidence of NHS privatisation: the 358 GP surgeries now run by Virgin Care, for example, or the details by sector of the 135 NHS services put out to tender since April.
However, the section I want to zoom in on in this blog post is the links between Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and private health care firms. By way of background, CCGs were established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. They include all the GP groups in the area and manage primary care in that area. They command £60 billion and decide which services should be commissioned, or bought by the NHS. This includes elective hospital care, rehabilitation care, urgent and emergency care, most community health services and mental health and learning disability services. This process is right at the heart of the creeping privatisation of the NHS.
Yet a survey by the British Medical Journal in March 2013 found that 36% of doctors with a place on one of the CCG boards had shares in private health companies, others were senior directors of those same companies. Now to be fair, board members are required to register their financial interests and leave the meeting when a conflict of interest comes up. Even so, as this list of conflicts of interest that have arisen on the 'NHS for sale' website shows, real concerns persist that decisions will be made not in the interest of patients' health but that of private profit.
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