“Foundation hospitals will lead to increased privatisation, higher costs and damaging competition in the NHS”. This is the hard hitting message that Dave Prentis General Secretary of UNISON, the UK’s largest union, will deliver to a TUC Conference on Public Services in Nottingham Friday (21 March).
Dave Prentis will attack the Government’s stance which sees the private sector as the solution to everything, where competition is king and where the principles of universal and equitable provision of healthcare are sacrificed to the god of the market place.
The highest profile example of these trends is Foundation Trusts. The Government presents these as a way to free hospitals from the bureaucracy of Whitehall and to give front-line staff more freedom to improve services, but the reality is very different. Foundation Trusts will sound the death knell for the NHS.
Dave Prentis will say:
“Foundation trusts will lead to greater privatisation because the Bill will allow not only existing NHS Trusts to apply to become NHS Foundation Trusts, but also other organisations from the private and voluntary sectors. There is nothing in the Bill that would prevent BUPA from being awarded a license to set up or take over an NHS hospital.
“Increased privatisation because there will be nothing to stop NHS hospitals that become foundation trusts from subcontracting their operations out to the private sector.”
As well as the threat of increased privatisation he will hone in on the increased costs implicit in Foundation Trusts:
“Higher costs because public spending will be substituted by more expensive private finance. Higher costs, because although influence and control will be passed over to private investors, if things go wrong it will be the Treasury that is obliged to pick up the bill in order to ensure the continued provision of services. And higher costs because as independent legal entities, Foundation Trusts must conclude formal legal contracts with commissioners, consuming time and piling up lawyer’s fees.”
UNISON is concerned about plans to re-create the internal market and the introduction of damaging competition into the NHS.
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Dave Prentis will say:
“More competition because Foundation hospitals are one part of a system of a wider competitive market being introduced into the NHS, a system which, whilst unpublicised at present, may turn out to be of even greater significance than foundation hospitals.
“Under this competitive market system, traditional NHS Trusts will compete alongside foundation hospitals and independent healthcare corporations to provide NHS healthcare services. PCTs will be able to commission from NHS hospitals outside their local area, or to bypass the public sector completely, commissioning services from the independent sector instead.”
ends