What a difference (less than) a year makes. In a press release back in February last year, private healthcare company Circle Holdings spun that it had, “transformed services at Hinchingbrooke”. The hospital, it boasted, “is now secure for the future”.
Which would make the news today that it was walking away two years into a 10-year contract to run Hinchingbrooke – the UK’s only privately-run NHS hospital – a shock, were it not for the sheer, abject predictability of it.
The fact that Circle is dumping the contract on financial grounds, citing a lack of funding and pressure on the casualty department, is certainly no surprise to many, not least the National Health Action Party founding member and Save Lewisham Hospital veteran Dr Louise Irvine.
She says: “This is exactly what we warned and predicted would happen and illustrates the folly of private sector involvement in our NHS. When the going gets tough, the private sector gets going – and dumps NHS patients. The privatisation experiment has lamentably failed”.
It isn’t unexpected, not least because in September last year, when Health Service Journal obtained a damning report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in which a litany of shocking failings were revealed, the writing was on the wall.
It was a miserable list. The CQC found, “little internal or clear external oversight of how the trust managed risks to the quality of care”; a lack of “clarity or coherence” over who was “responsible for the oversight and scrutiny of the trust’s quality agenda”; poor hygiene standards; “poor care provided to patients”, and, perhaps most damning of all, a “blame approach, rather than that of a supportive and patient focused approach”.
Circle had been held up as a shining example of a private company stepping in to triumph where the NHS had failed. It’s impossible to see how this rhetoric can be maintained with any integrity given this monumental failure; the privatisation experiment is unravelling before our eyes.
And what’s striking about this example is that it is not only a failure of patient care standards, but in hard-nosed economics as well. As I pointed out in October, one of the many severe consequences of marketisation – one totally overlooked in Simon Stevens’ big rescue plan – is that when private companies bin their contracts with the NHS in such a self-serving fashion, it is the trusts’ time and precious taxpayer funds that end up being wasted on picking up the pieces.
What cost will Circle’s walking away be to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough? I shudder to think. And, thanks to the Health and Social Care Act, the next chapter in this woeful saga will have to be another gruelling and costly tendering process, administrated by the trust.
And it goes full circle – if you’ll excuse the pun. Why are A&E departments in crisis? It’s extremely complex, but it would help if the limited resources trusts are being asked to survive on weren’t wasted in such gross examples of false economics, and privatisation going so drastically wrong.
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