A failing hospital looks set to be managed by a private sector company after the only NHS bidder withdrew from the tendering process.
East of England NHS is offering an operating franchise to run the health service at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, a 369-bed DGH in Cambridgeshire, from April 2011. The services include A&E and maternity.
Five companies have progressed to the next stage of the search for a new operating partner for the hospital. Formal submissions were received from: Care UK (Partnership Health Group Limited); Circle Health; Interhealth Canada (UK) Ltd; Ramsay Health Care UK and Serco Health.
All the companies seeking to run the contract have provided elective surgery to NHS patients in independent sector treatment centres.
Cambridge University Hospitals Trust recently withdrew from the race to run the hospital. A spokesman for the trust said: “The competitive bidding process will involve considerable investment in both time and money.
“Continuing to take part would have an impact on services at Addenbrooke’s and The Rosie. Accordingly, we have decided to withdraw from the process.”
The franchise operator will have to help repay an NHS loan being used to underwrite the hospital’s £40m debt.
Dr Stephen Dunn, director of strategy at NHS East of England, denied this was privatisation and explained that staff and assets would remain within the NHS.
“Over the last two months, we’ve held meetings with the potential partners, and they’ve had tours of the hospital and met with medical staff and local GPs. From their submissions we are getting a really good feel for what they think they can bring to Hinchingbrooke and their visions for how they plan to make the hospital sustainable in the long term,” he said.
“This is exactly the quality of ideas and innovation we were looking for with this franchise process.”
Services on the hospital site provided by other organisations, such as Cambridgeshire Community Services, will be unaffected by this franchise offer.
A spokesman for the BMA said: “The NHS has been forced to compete in an environment where everything is skewed to the interests of private providers. NHS services are funded by the public and should be accountable to patients, not shareholders or private equity. We are very concerned about the impact of this development and the precedent it sets.”
Good Hope hospital, in Sutton Coldfield, was taken over by management consultants Tribal in 2003 but there was little improvement and the hospital was soon merged with the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust in Birmingham.
Tags: Privatisation
From this news item it would appear that this hospital is ‘failing’ NOW. Yet the private ‘operating franchise’ (i.e. ‘management’) is not to take over till April 2011! What happens meanwhile? I presume it can go on ‘failing’! Poor patients; poor taxpayers!