Creeping NHS privatisation is hampering our Covid-19 response
We will not let this government shock doctrine our NHS with further sell-offs, write campaigning organisations including Keep our NHS Public. Plus letters from Dr Sylvia Berney, Mary Pimm and Nik Wood, and John Vincent
In the past few weeks, the government has ramped up outsourcing (UK government ‘using pandemic to transfer NHS duties to private sector’, 4 May), repeatedly handing over contracts to companies to run operations that the NHS should be leading.
The private sector has proven itself to be ineffective, with profits and cost-cutting consistently put before care. Testing centres are being run by Deloitte, KPMG, Serco, Sodexo, Mitie, Boots and the US data mining group Palantir, funded by our money.
Even before this crisis, the government was helping private companies to creep into our NHS. We will not let this government shock doctrine our NHS with further privatisation. This experience has taught us that we are all in this together, and that our NHS is a vital, lifesaving organ, there for us all. NHS funding is not there for governments to prop up private companies, it is there to keep us safe.
Caroline Molloy Editor, OurNHS openDemocracy, John Lister Editor, Health Campaigns Together, Dr Ameen Kamlana, GP, Anthony Johnson Lead organiser, Nurses United UK, Cat Hobbs Director, We Own It, Alan Taman Doctors for the NHS, Tony O Sullivan Co-chair, Keep our NHS Public, Brian Fisher Socialist Health Association, Diarmaid McDonald Lead organiser, Just Treatment
• The future threat of privatisation of the NHS from the UK/US deal is distracting us from the fact that privatisation is going on under our noses during this pandemic.
As a pathologist working for the NHS, I could not understand why accredited laboratories in the NHS and laboratory facilities such as the Crick Institute were not fully utilised for testing of Covid-19.
The deputy chief medical officer has admitted that lack of testing altered the approach to management of the pandemic, which may have increased the number of deaths.
Now we learn that a private company is coordinating three new test centres. So the government has not been following its mantra to “protect the NHS”. Rather it is continuing its unrelenting use of the private sector, even when it risks the lives of its citizens.
Dr Sylvia Berney
London
• For over 40 years, our political representatives have pursued polices that have undermined the capability of our national health service.
The so-called market created business units in silos, each in competition with the other while procurement was fragmented. Mountains of private debt built up. And then austerity funding enforced a concept of efficiency that sees any capacity held as insurance as slack. All this has conspired to see social care effectively privatised, GP surgeries becoming virtual and our capacity to cope with an epidemic undermined.
Before 1948 there was no accountability at all. Healthcare relied on private, profit-driven firms and self-selected charities and philanthropists. To revert to that because of the failures of our political class, as David McCoy fears (Coronavirus has exposed the dangerous failings of NHS marketisation, 5 May), must be fought tooth and nail.
Mary Pimm and Nik Wood
London
• David McCoy underestimates how the dogma of privatisation has undermined Britain’s ability to mount a coordinated response to Covid-19. Privatisation of residential care for older people in the Thatcher era was a precursor of the longstanding crisis in provision, including so-called “bed blocking”. Not being a saleable asset, public health moved from the NHS to local government with the 2012 NHS reorganisation. The two manifestly weakest areas in the response so far – the safety of care home staff and residents on the one hand, and contact tracing and testing on the other, come within its remit.
John Vincent
Tedburn St Mary, Devon