I’m afraid Stephen Dalton is wrong about pretty much everything (Private money is the NHS’s saviour, not its bogeyman, 22 November). Where sustainability and transformation plans have been published (most have been shrouded in secrecy, and for good reason) it is clear that cuts and closures are on the way. For instance, 600 GPs are to be reduced to 400 in one part of London alone, and maternity units and A&E departments face the axe. We have the second lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the EU, and that is set to fall further. Dalton says we must move care away from hospitals, but that means investing in primary and community care, both of which have been undermined and cut.
Dalton says that the private sector can help the NHS. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The private sector has always been there, but as a peripheral presence and not competing with the NHS. The compulsory competition introduced by Andrew Lansley has been a very costly failure. The private sector is expensive, unaccountable, and will walk away when it can’t make a profit. By cherrypicking profitable services it destabilises the local NHS, which can’t drop the expensive work or turn away patients with complex problems. And its ethos is questionable, leading, for example, to profits being sent offshore with no tax paid.
The answer for the current NHS crisis is to fund the NHS to the EU average (it is currently heading down to less than 7% GDP), to deal with the costly market and PFI schemes which are wasting money hand over fist, to value and support the staff, and to stop re-disorganising it every two years in a futile effort to sort out the last political mess inflicted on it.
Dr Jacky Davis
Founder member, Keep Our NHS Public
• The article by Stephen Dalton is simplistic in the extreme. Here in Cornwall we have examples of two of the privatisations he extols. Both failures.
Twelve years ago a panel I was a member of voted to give Serco the out-of-hours service for Cornwall. It was a mistake. They were condemned by a parliamentary committee for cooking the books and they have since abandoned the contract. I voted against them.
In 2014 the Royal Cornwall hospitals trust board of which I was vice-chairman voted to allow Mitie to run their hotel services, catering, cleaning etc. I voted against. They have proved to be a disaster. If Stephen Dalton wishes to write these misleading articles he should at least give examples of the successes of privatisation. Does Hinchingbrooke ring a bell with him?
Rik Evans
Truro, Cornwall
• Stephen Dalton argues that “examples of beneficial of private sector involvement include … more rapid discharge from hospital through well-established ‘recovery at home’ services and access to private sector community diagnostic facilities”. Meanwhile you report that the private company Mitie has said it would withdraw from its healthcare business, which provides home care for the elderly (Mitie profit warning as it bales out of elderly care, 22 November); your article quotes the chief executive as saying that government spending cuts had made the healthcare business unviable: “If we are serious about social care in the UK it needs significantly more than the funding that has been suggested.” Quite.
More generally it is worrying that Dalton, as chief executive of the NHS Confederation, still does not understand that for private companies profits come before patients, and that any system that has to fork out to shareholders has less to spend on care. Supposed benefits from “greater efficiency” usually means cutting corners and paying workers less.
Dr David Griffith
London
• Despite Stephen Dalton’s assertion of an apparent “political negativity” towards privatisation of the NHS, the non-public-sector involvement within our healthcare system actually continues unabated: the Department of Health’s funding of “independent sector providers” rose from £4.1bn in 2009-10 to £8.7bn in 2015-16. And a study published in the Journal of Public Health in July this year found that: “An increased use of private sector provision by NHS boards was associated with a significant decrease in direct NHS provision and with widening inequalities by age and socio-economic deprivation.”
Steven Jouanny
Sheffield
• We completely agree with Stephen Dalton’s assertion that we need to shift the focus away from hospitals in order to help create a more sustainable NHS. However, being more open to private providers is not the only answer.
The mixed economy for end-of-life care in the UK is a case in point, and the role of charitable hospices in this should not be overlooked. Last year hospices in the UK spent more than £868m on care and supported 200,000 people with life-limiting conditions – a significant contribution to the UK’s health economy.
Hospice care is provided free and yet hospices receive only a third of their funding from the NHS, having to raise the rest themselves through community fundraising. Hospices have a strong ethos of compassionate care, coupled with a vibrant culture of innovation and enterprise reflected in the new and different ways they raise income and successful partnerships developed with other providers.
In these hugely challenging times for the NHS, improving end-of-life care by working more closely with hospices could help deliver the sustainability that is so desperately needed.
Tracey Bleakley
CEO, Hospice UK
• On the occasion of American Thanksgiving, as a British citizen who lives in the US but finds myself in the UK with an ailing father, I feel compelled to express my gratitude for one of the things that makes the UK exceptional: the NHS and associated strongly held value that good healthcare for all is a right not a privilege. I am a management consultant and have spent a large chunk of my career working within the American healthcare system. The recent US election troubles me greatly as the incoming administration seems to offer little vision for healthcare other than the aspiration to unwind the recent gains of improved access to all. In recent weeks I have sat holding my sleeping father’s hand as he moves beyond a stroke. As I’ve watched the wonderful staff on the Dunkery stroke unit at Musgrove Park hospital in Taunton, which, somewhat ironically, started as an American army hospital during the second world war, I have felt incredibly grateful for the compassionate care he – and my family – are receiving. Absent is the additional stress of wondering how we as a family will be able to pay for his care, which would already be well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars had he been born on the other side of the pond.
Celia Kirwan
Boston, Massachusetts
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Private providers are part of the NHS’s problem, not the solution | Letters
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