Death by a thousand contracts | Is the NHS being privatised under nurses noses?

Image by kind permission of: NHS Solidarity

Following the 1948 Public Health Act the Secretary of State for Health had a legal obligation to provide universal health care.  In 2012, by passing the Health and Social Care Act, the Coalition Government removed the duty to provide universal heath care and enshrined in law instead the right of the Secretary of State for Health to develope a marketised, insurance based healthcare system.  More than 10 years later and Drs and Nurses on the frontline tell us that the NHS is being privatised, contract-by-contract, right under their noses.

 

Professor Allyson Pollock is Director of the Institute of Health and Society

So where's the saving made when contracting out chunks of the NHS?  You'd think that for an organisation with such a fantastically well motivated staff, outsourcing would distraction from patient care and just add another tier of expensive management. On top of the extra cost of outsourcing healthcare, there's the reality that part of the money spent on buying in NHS services goes straight into the pockets of the private business owners that, quite naturally, want a slice of the action. 

While NHS managers, spend their days trying to decide between competing healthcare suppliers, sick patients are stuck in ambulances, or being treated in privately owned hospital car parks.  This must  be agonisingly difficult to endure day in day out, but this is what a marketised healthcare system looks like.  Privatisation of the NHS is unwanted, unnecessary and, worst of all, is failing the public miserably - but it doesn’t have to be like this.

If in 1948, after being bankrupted by two World Wars, the UK could afford to provide Universal Health Care, why is it today, as the sixth largest economy in the World after France, that we are told that the country can't afford to pay for a publicly run Health Service, or pay doctors and nurses properly?  

In 2023, while Doctors and Nurses are having to fight for better working conditions and a fair wage, Ministers continue to dismantle the NHS by systematically outsourcing healthcare contract-by-contract to private companies.  

The argument that the UK can't afford the NHS is a myth put about by free market ideologues as they  convince unwitting NHS managers that the only way to save the NHS is through the miracle of private enterprise.  NHS management, however, are torn between their belief in the provision of Universal Healthcare enshrined in the original 1948 Act and the certain knowledge their employment is dependent on the inexorable shift towards a marketised healthcare system that has removed by law the duty of the Secretary of State for Health to provide Universal Healthcare for all.  Without structural and political change, sadly, the future of the NHS looks increasingly bleak.

What Drs say about NHS funding since 2017
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The Department for Health and Social Care Perspective