NOBODY knows the number of botched or mismanaged operations being carried out by the private Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) businesses, funded by the government to perform work for the National Health Service (NHS).
This is the dangerous situation that has been exposed in an interim study carried out by the official Health Commission, leaked to Health Service Journal.
According to this NHS watchdog, statistics on clinical care are ‘incomplete and of extremely poor quality’. It found that for 91 per cent of patients no diagnosis had been coded. For large numbers of those treated no procedure was listed. For many patients it was not even possible to discern in which ISTC they had been treated!
District General Hospitals and NHS specialist centres record ‘hospital episode’ information and these statistics allow comparisons to be made between different hospitals.
Anna Walker, the Health Commission’s Chief Executive said: ‘It is a contractual requirement for (the ISTCs) to provide hospital episode statistics data returns, but this is not happening in a lot of cases. She said this was ‘just the tip of the iceberg’. Walker said that full details of cancelled operations, or information about patients being readmitted for corrective surgery were not always available?!
These activities of the privateers, funded by the government out of the NHS budget, provoked an angry response from doctors’ organisations yesterday.
The British Medical Association (BMA) spokesman said: ‘We share the concerns raised about the lack of statistical information on the quality and effectiveness of ISTCs.’ The BMA knows of a number of cases ‘where there are concerns over the standards of care’. He said that ISTCs’ ‘effect on the training of junior doctors’ were of particular concern.
Mr John Getty, the President of the British Orthopaedic Association, said yesterday: ‘The lack of data is a very serious flaw in clinical governance.’ He said that despite the fact that ISTCs operate on the fittest patients, ‘we have got concerns that there has been higher rates of complications than those coming back from the NHS’.
Getty insisted: ‘The same standards should apply to ISTCs as apply in the NHS.’
Despite this dire situation, 10 per cent of non-emergency operations on NHS patients are being carried out by these private companies at present. This proportion is being increased rapidly, the sky being the limit according to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.
It is clear that the Blair-Brown government’s privatisation of the NHS, through paying private ISTC businesses to provide treatments for NHS patients, is not only providing a quality of care that may be dangerous, but is undermining hospitals and training of the new doctors.
The involvement of private corporations in the provision of NHS care is already shaping the NHS to the requirements of businesses run for profit.
In the government’s ‘reconfiguration’ of 60 District General Hospitals, (the closure of wards, operating theatres, and Accident and Emergency departments in local hospitals) the Strategic Health Authority (SHA) planners and the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), that distribute the funds, are working to this business agenda.
Funds for Private Finance Initiative (PFI) hospital buildings contracts and block funding for contracts with ISTCs come first. The PCTs insist these funds must be guaranteed because the contracts have been signed and insist that government cuts must fall on NHS hospitals, GP services and traditional community healthcare provisions.
Privatisation of the NHS is clearly dangerous to the health of millions of working-class and middle-class families who rely on free, publicly-owned and provided NHS care.
The only way to halt the destruction of the NHS is through the working class taking action, both locally and nationally.
Trade unionists must join with community organisations to build councils of action in their districts, that can organise demonstrations, pickets, strikes and occupations, to stop the cuts and closures taking place at their local hospitals.
Workers must demand their national unions work together through the Trades Union Congress to organise mass strike action to bring down the Blair-Brown government and replace it with a workers’ government.
Such a socialist government will scrap the market in healthcare within the NHS, take over the PFI hospitals, nationalise the ISTCs and incorporate them into the NHS, throw private contractors out of the hospitals and restore in-house services, and expand a state-owned and provided, universal, free NHS.
