CHRISTINA McAnea, Unison National Secretary for Health, has written to Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt about the proposed transfer of Primary Care Support services from NHS England to the Capita privateer
She wrote: ‘I am writing to you on behalf of Unison to express our grave concern and disappointment at the decision of NHS England – supported by the Department of Health – to conclude contract discussions with Capita transferring all Primary Care Support (PCS) services to them for up to 10 years . . .
‘The safe movement of patient medical records is of vital importance. At any one time PCS staff are looking after 3 million patient records. Keeping this secure and under the direct control of NHS managers is important for patients.
‘The centralisation of services and keeping large amounts of personal data on NHS patients in England secure is in our view made riskier by the NHS sub contracting this service to other organisations.
‘Currently, PCS services provide screening services to patients and that is of critical importance in tackling, for instance, various types of cancer and then getting treatment early to patients. That people receive the correct information speedily and securely is essential.’
She adds: ‘In our view the much safer option would have been to support a proper nationally organised in house reorganisation of the service. That would have maintained NHS control and given assurances about protecting the integrity of the services.
‘There has been no consultation with the public in England over transferring patient medical records into a private company – nor has there been any public consultation over the transfer of screening services to the private sector.
‘The decision by NHS England to recommend the award of a huge contract to Capita was made at a secret, closed meeting over which no documents, papers or information have been made publicly available. It is wrong that decisions on the transfer of large services and staff to the private sector are made in closed, private meetings without any public scrutiny or indeed knowledge.
‘Even the staff who work in the service have been excluded from information about the meeting and how and why it made its decision. Clearly Capita are bidding for this contract to make themselves a profit – if your managers had chosen to support the in-house option they would have saved monies, diverting any surplus to the NHS itself not to shareholders, and protected NHS services and the integrity and privacy of NHS patient records.
‘Indeed, at a meeting last week Capita stated they would be making a profit from this service as early as Year 3 of the contract. Those profits will not remain within the NHS. . .
‘It is believed that Capita intend to close down the vast majority of local offices (thus losing the local service contact which is so important) and to operate the service with a hugely reduced workforce. There are immense risks inherent in this approach, apart from the redundancy of hundreds of long serving NHS staff . . .
‘Our union is asking if you could intervene with NHS England to explore whether this service should and could remain directly part of the NHS because of its importance to basic but essential services. The repercussions to the NHS in England if this very complex contract was to fail would be extremely serious.’
