NHS must do better… but don’t go private

 

Days after the Care Quality Commission found the Royal Free had failed to meet standards of care for its elderly patients, Neil Fletcher says the inspectors don’t go into private hospitals…

Published: 2nd June, 2011

NO it has not been the best week ever for the Royal Free Hospital. 

Being woken by news headlines screaming that old people were found dying of thirst in the Royal Free makes you a smidgeon less proud of it than you were when you went to bed.

But behind the headlines was a success story of kinds and when the principle of universal healthcare, free at the point of delivery, is under threat.

We have a National Health Service that cares for us all from cradle to grave. It’s a mammoth undertaking and one that practically the whole world envies. 

And while no one likes being caught out having 40 winks on the job, the NHS – like all public services in the UK – has to take justified criticism on the chin. 

That is the way we do things.

Rightly so. We must never forget that it’s our elderly folk who paid their taxes, who fought against fascism, and who worked long hours running our schools and hospitals, who are now in the care homes and elderly wards of the Royal Free. 

So pull your finger out you nurses. Our senior citizens deserve better. 

This is the message that the health inspectors were absolutely justified in making. 

But no one should assume that a privately run NHS would be better. 

To do so would be to fly in the face of evidence from the US, from much – not all – of Europe, and elsewhere.

Of course, when we hear or read about things going wrong up in Pond Street it’s not because the red-tops with their muck-raking editors and absurdly powerful proprietors felt the need to do us all a favour. 

The story came out into the open because we have a public health service that employs public health inspectors to visit out of the blue and write reports on what they find. For better or worse.

In a free society that’s a version of success. 

The inspectors said so not anonymously on Twitter but in an openly transparent public report. We’d all rather have problems out in the open and then put right openly too.

Defenders of private health, like many government ministers and their highly-paid advisers, point at the so-called benefits of competition. 

I have heard this week of two private health companies preparing to get their noses in the NHS trough. 

A Camden physiotherapist working for both BUPA and the NHS was told that he would have to double the number of patients seen per day if he wanted to have his BUPA contract renewed next year. And a private chiropodist complained, in the same vein, that she was exhausted and demoralised each day by the number of extra treatments for NHS patients she was currently being required to give. 

Heaven help us all when these guys get the contract to run even more of our health services.

Naturally, our health inspectors never go into private hospitals so we never hear stories of poor, uncaring, nurses and cruel treatments doled out behind the private lace curtains of the paid-for hospitals and care homes. 

Sixty-four per cent of the public in the British Social Attitudes Survey 2010 were “very or quite satisfied with the NHS”, the highest figure on a rising trend since 2004. 

Even Conservative voters have expressed significantly higher levels of satisfaction with the NHS than 10 years ago. 

I heard from a researcher that most complaints 13 years ago were about poor service, endless waiting lists and patients lying on stretchers in corridors. 

Complaints today, apparently, are “transactional”: about rudeness, mistakes over appointments, communication lapses and so on. Not good but who today hears complaints about year-long delays waiting for urgent operations?

This week I sent out a questionnaire to every single Camden councillor about the NHS reforms. Should they be halted? Should they go ahead as planned? Or be significantly amended? 

In a democracy it is important that the people we elect to run our public services tell us what they believe – especially on an issue as explosive as the NHS reforms the government is proposing.

In the meantime you might like to tell your councillors what you want them to do. 

• Neil Fletcher was a Camden councillor, chair of policy and resources and deputy leader of the council. He was also for 11 years Camden member of the Inner London Education Authority and its leader until its abolition in 1990.