Seemingly everyone has a plan these days on how the NHS can save money. Some are much more interesting than the current march towards privatisation. And, ’yes’, for interesting read insane.
Forget outsourcing, the new buzz word is globalisation. Professor Richard Smith, a health economist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, believes £120m a year could be saved by sending NHS patients to India for routine heart and orthopaedic procedures.
It’s unlikely, however, that either the health secretary or his shadow will want to talk about privatising health delivery this week, let alone entertain health tourism. Both have recently had their fingers burnt on the subject.
When Andy Burnham announced late last year that the NHS would remain the preferred provider of services, and that under-performing NHS services would be given “at least two chances” to improve before alternative providers were considered, he probably thought that his word would be law.
He didn’t bank on NHS Partners Network, the representative organisation of private health providers, challenging this thinking along with the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations. The Cooperation and Competition Panel has agreed to investigate their joint complaint into a PCT, which blocked bids from voluntary and private organisations for a contract to provide community health services saying only NHS organisations could bid. Big business will be watching the case with interest.
The Tories have made a brazen manifesto commitment to increasing the role independent providers in the NHS. But, this week, they appeared a little too keen when it was revealed that private provider Care UK had donated £21k towards funding the shadow health secretary’s personal office.
A spokesman for the Conservatives said: “It has been properly registered with the parliamentary register as well as with the Electoral Commission and is therefore fully within the rules.” Sound familiar?
Then, just to bring us full circle, another prominent health figure emerged from the woodwork to generate a bit more controversy. Lord Nigel Crisp, former NHS chief executive, is plugging his new book on global health at the moment. He told the Sunday Telegraph that our doctors are over qualified.
“I think in this country we have gone too far towards specialisation in training. We train our doctors to become more and more specialised and high powered; then we give them work to do which is quite routine and mundane and doesn’t require their level of skill,” claimed Lord Crisp.
To save another fortune all we need do is copy Uganda and just train our surgeons for three years in simple surgery. And apparently Ethiopian doctors have better clinical skills than UK doctors because they actually listen to the patients…
So there we have it, all we’ve got to do to weather the downturn is farm loads of work out to private providers who are nice to us, let them employ tonnes of doctors who’ve only trained for three years and, if there any patients left, ship them off to India.
Who said managing the NHS was hard?