Social Investigations: NHS privatisation: Compilation of financial and vested interests.

Social Investigations: NHS privatisation: Compilation of financial and vested interests..

 

This list represents the dire state of our democracy. The financial and vested interests of our MPs and Lords in private healthcare.

Over 200 parliamentarians have recent past or present financial links to companies involved in healthcare and all were allowed to vote on the Health and Social Care bill, turning it into an Act.

Who cares that they have put it in the register of interests. This doesn’t excuse their interests, it merely highlights clearly why they should have no part in voting for what is fast becoming the dismantling of the NHS. It is privatisation, despite the media’s continued use of the word ‘reforms’. The question must be asked. Are they public servants or corporate servants?

 

If you care about the NHS et al, please read the full blog at the above link

2015

“What’s so special about 2015?”  you may ask. It’s just a number, just another year, a bit like 1984 maybe.

2015 is the proposed date for the next General Election, but 2015 is so much more than that.  The next election is almost an irrelevance, no-one knows who to vote for any more any way.

In April 2015 the Civil Service Pension Scheme will change;

For those civil servants who move to the new 2015 scheme, the main features are:

• A move to a ‘career average’ scheme, rather than ‘final salary’ for those currently in classic, classic plus and premium schemes. This means your benefits earned after April 2015 will be calculated in a different way. They will be based on an average of your earnings for each year you work until you leave or retire rather than the last salary you are on. nuvos is already a career average scheme.

• A new ‘accrual rate’ of 2.32%. An ‘accrual rate’ is the percentage of your salary that the scheme puts aside each year towards your pension. The current rate for nuvos is 2.3%.

• A new ‘Scheme Pension Age’ in line with your ‘State Pension Age’ (due to increase to 68 over time). This is the age at which you can draw your new scheme benefits in full. You would be able to retire earlier but your Civil Service pension would be reduced to reflect that it would be paid out for longer. The current Scheme Pension Age for nuvos is 65.

The current final salary police pension schemes will close from April 2015, with future accrual based on the new CARE model.

In a final salary scheme, your pension is typically worked out as a fraction of your final salary for each year of service. The ‘final salary’ used is generally the highest paid level of your last few years. For instance:

• if you are in the Police Pension Scheme 1987, you receive a pension calculated as ((1/60th x the number of years up to 20) + (2/60 x the number of years served between 20 and 30 years)) x final pensionable pay
• if you are in the New Police Pension Scheme 2006, you receive a pension calculated as 1/70th x final pensionable pay x years (up to a maximum of 35 years)

In a career average scheme, each year you build up a ‘slice’ of pension based on your salary in that year. At the end of each year, the slice is increased in line with the revaluation rate used for that scheme – typically either prices or earnings increases – to maintain the value of the pension earned. When a member finally retires, their total pension is calculated by adding up the slices of pension they have built up each year throughout their career.

April 2015 was also scheduled to be the date for implementing the new State Pension Scheme, of a Flat Rate Pension of £140 per week.  Reforms were expected to be introduced in 2015, however Prime Minister David Cameron has called for the reforms to be re-examined, according to the Financial Times, calling the expected deadline into question.

The Teachers’ Pension Scheme is also scheduled to change (not for the better perhaps) on 1st April 2015.

April 2015 also sees changes to the Firefighters Pension Scheme; another Career Average Scheme, much along the same lines as other Public Service Pensions.

David Cameron originally assured us that Coastguard Stations would begin to close in 2015, but now seems to have forgotten that promise and the closures have already begun. Rest assured though, I’m sure all scheduled closures will have happened by 2015.

The existing 35 local probation trusts are to be scrapped and replaced by a single, smaller, national probation service. They will also be replaced by 21 “government-owned companies” covering England and Wales that will invite bids from the private and voluntary sectors, including G4S and Serco, to take over existing probation work as well as the new rehabilitation programme for released short-sentenced prisoners. The plans are to be in place by the next general election in 2015.

From 2015 GCSE’s will be graded eight to one, instead of A* to G, and the pass mark will be higher.

There’ll be a move towards essay-based exams at the end of two years, instead of coursework and assessments during the course.

The content will be harder too – for example, English will require studying a 19th-Century novel and a whole Shakespeare play.

The armed forces budget is not safe from cuts after 2015, David Cameron has publicly admitted for the first time.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, is preparing a Spending Review for 2015/16 that has raised the prospect of more cuts in the Ministry of Defence budget, on top of those made by the Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2010.

Mr Cameron has previously insisted that “defence can’t be exempt all together from difficult decisions”.

Citizens Advice Bureaux may be forced to close if plans to change the system of civil legal aid go ahead. The Government’s proposals are intended to cut the legal aid bill by £350 million a year by 2015. Funding for a wide range of disputes – including some divorce, clinical negligence, and immigration where the person is not detained – would be axed.

Independent Living Fund

The Independent Living Fund (ILF) – which provides money to help people with disabilities live an independent life in the community – is to close in 2015.

Funding will be incorporated into local social care arrangements – through local councils in England and the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales.

People who already have ILF care packages will have to transfer to new local arrangements.

October 2015, Personal Independence Payment, Claimants aged 16-64 still receiving Disability Living Allowance (DLA) will start to be contacted to claim Personal Independence Payment instead.

NHS Reform, to be completed by 2015, the reforms are partly designed to encourage greater involvement from the private sector and charities. In total, £1 of every £20 spent in the NHS goes to a non-NHS provider. The cost of the reform programme is £1.4bn.

Most of that will come in the next two years as more than 20,000 management and administration staff are made redundant from health authorities, PCTs and the Department of Health.

It could cost as much as £1bn to make redundancies. Another £400m will be spent on things such as IT and property in setting up the new consortia.

But the government claims the cost will be more than offset by savings.

The reduction in staff alone will save £5bn by 2015, according to the government’s own costings.

So, do you still think that 2015 is just a number like any other, or could it be that our wonderful ConDem Coalition government have completely lost sight of ethics and principles, and are in an indecent haste to reform everything in sight prior to the next election in 2015.  Bring on the Monster Raving Loony Party I say.

The NHS as we know it needs a prayer

REBLOGGED FROM http://www.opendemocracy.net

 

Regulations passed last week will turn England’s National Health Service into a competitive market. They appear to contradict assurances from the Coalition government on one of the most central elements of the Bill.

Last Wednesday the Department of Health quietly released regulations  that open up England’s National Heath Service to competition on an unprecedented scale. These regulations have started their 40-day journey to becoming law. They contradict the political assurances given during the turbulent passage through parliament of the controversial Health and Social Care Act 2012 and confirm the fears of its critics.

The extent to which competition should be applied to the NHS has been at the heart of fierce debates surrounding the Health and Social Care Bill since it was published in 2011. Government representatives have maintained that the use of competitive markets is central to their purpose . Critics warned that making competition compulsory was dangerous and driven by ideology and commercial interests rather than evidence-based best health practice. It was also feared prioritising competition indiscriminately could create a fragmented, expensive, bureaucratic health service  and a transition to much fuller privatisation .

Reblogged from The NHS as we know it needs a prayer | openDemocracy.  Read the full story there

This all sounds a bit too familiar to me

Many NHS hospitals in England are paying over the odds for supplies, a snapshot investigation suggests.

The findings come despite long-standing concerns from MPs and the National Audit Office over wasteful procurement.  Ernst and Young looked at 10 NHS hospital trusts out of 166 – and found the prices paid for the same box of medical forceps ranged from £13 to £23.

For an identical box of blankets the lowest price was £47, the highest more than £120.

Joe Stringer, from Ernst & Young, said the discrepancies were “staggering”, and he warned that the problem was getting worse. Trusts, he said, were reluctant to share information for fear of helping their competitors.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said: “The government is encouraging hospitals to think and act like independent businesses. As a result, they’re losing the potential for the NHS to use its collective buying power. Market-based health systems cost more not less and this is one of the reasons why.”  Market-based?  Isn’t that a euphemism for Privatised?

The Big Picture has featured the NHS before and it doesn’t seem like they’re out of the woods yet.  Andy Burnham’s quote above appears to give the impression that privatised services cost more not less.  This is exactly the message that we, and others, have been trying to get across.

What will it take to get this steamrollering government to climb down off their hobbyhorses and actually do something for the good of the country?

BBC News – Consultants warn care hit by poor deals on supplies.

All of this sounds just a little bit similar to the situation highlighted by our own @J_amesP back in August.  43 Police Forces of England and Wales seem to have 43 different versions of the uniform.  How nonsensical is that?  Like the NHS standardisation would bring about cheaper procurement.  Simples.  But there’s probably a Lord somewhere that owns a company that makes Police uniform, so it won’t happen.

NHS Connecting For Health

Good old NHS, a subject close to all of our hearts, especially the closer we get to our twilight years.

I make no bones about it, leaving party politics out of it just for a minute, I am a firm believer in Cradle To The Grave Healthcare, and if you ever want to see me really angry just engage me on Privatised Healthcare.

What is it?

An initiative by the Department of Health in England to move the National Health Service (NHS) in England towards a single, centrally-mandated electronic care record for patients and to connect 30,000 General practitioners to 300 hospitals, providing secure and audited access to these records by authorised health professionals.

The programme was established in October 2002 following several Department of Health reports on IT Strategies for the NHS., and on April 1, 2005 a new agency called NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) was formed to deliver the programme. CfH absorbed both staff and workstreams from the abolished NHS Information Authority, the organisation it replaced. CfH is based in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

The cost of the programme, together with its ongoing problems of management and the withdrawal or sacking of two of the four IT providers, have placed it at the centre of ongoing controversy, and the Commons Public Accounts Committee has repeatedly expressed serious concerns over its scope, planning, budgeting, and practical value to patients. As of January 2009, while some systems were being deployed across the NHS, other key components of the system were estimated to be four years behind schedule, and others had yet to be deployed outside individual trusts at all^.

Eventually things came to a head in 2011.The project to “modernise” the NHS computer systems, replacing them all with a single system that would enable any doctor to access any patient’s records stalled.  After a decade, and nearly £12 billion spent, the project was abandoned, without a new system, but with the NHS facing a £750 million lawsuit from one of the contractors.

Let me just make this quite clear, – £12 billion would pay the salaries of 60,000 nurses (that’s SIXTY THOUSAND, not a typo) for 10 YEARS.

I’d like to think that this story ended here, but it doesn’t.  It’s not all about the money.

Human suffering is inextricably linked to Health matters.  The shambolic computer system was (allegedly) responsible for the following catastrophes;

• 2007: Enfield PCT were unable to obtain vital data on patients awaiting operations and were obliged to delay 63 patients of the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals. Further, 20 patients were not readmitted for treatment within 28 days towards the end of the year because the surveillance system for tracking them “was not operational in the new … system”.

• Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust found that problems with the system had meant potentially infectious patients with MRSA were not isolated for up to 17 days, requiring six weeks work by staff to update them manually.

• April 2008: Enfield PCT found that the system had failed to flag up possible child-abuse victims entering hospital to key staff, “leaving the responsibility to the receptionist”

• May 2008: Enfield PCT found that 272 elective operations were cancelled at the last minute for “non-clinical reasons”

• May 2008: Barts and The London NHS Trust blamed their failure over the preceding six months to meet targets for treating emergency patients within four hours on staff not being familiar with the new computer system. The same report cited “breaches of the two-week urgent cancer access guarantee” and delays in assessing 11 patients with possible cancer as being due to the computer system.

• July 2008: the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust said 12,000 patient records had to be manually amended over a three-week period due to the system, and noted that “The outpatient appointment centre has experienced a significant increase in the time taken to process individual patient appointment bookings. This has had a consequent and negative effect on call-answer performance.”

So there you have it, another £12 billion pounds wasted as The Big Picture takes its stroll trough Government Wastage.  I hope you’re adding it all up.  I’m not necessarily certain that we can blame individual MPs and Ministers, I’m sure there’s some Sir Humphrey’s to blame somewhere along the way.

Politician or Civil Servant doesn’t matter to the great British Public, they’re incompetent and that’s the bottom line.

The whole damn lot needs shaking up.  Let’s do it, let’s do it large, and let’s do it ONCE.  Never again should we have to endure these shambles.

999, Which Emergency Service Do You Require? Ambulance?

Need an Ambulance?  Need it now?  Can’t get one?  Maybe this will help explain why.

I’ve heard of Bed Blocking in the NHS but until recently I had never heard of Ambulance Blocking.  Well I have now and it isn’t funny.

Big Brother assures us that it isn’t a widespread problem, but everywhere I looked I found terrible examples of it.  Maybe I was just lucky?

The first item I found was this;

Hundreds of patients forced to wait in ambulances

The number of ambulance handovers delayed by more than 20 minutes to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and Cheltenham General Hospital is above target with high admissions levels being blamed.

Delays decreased in August of this year after rising in June and July, but the number of patients left waiting was still above the monthly target of 174. Since April, there have been 1,339 delays. The target for the same period was 870.

In Cornwall, Ambulance Blocking is costing them a fortune

Royal Cornwall Hospital pays £100k for ambulance delays

A hospital trust in Cornwall has had to pay more than £100,000 in penalties for keeping ambulances waiting this year.

The Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust (RCHT) is charged £100 every time an ambulance is held for more than 30 minutes during a hospital handover.

A report for the trust’s board said there had so far been 1,018 recorded delays in 2012.

Maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons for this began to come clear last week

Don’t leave patients in ambulances to hit A&E targets, hospitals told

NHS managers are accused of leaving patients in the vehicles so they can meet the target to treat everyone within four hours of being admitted to accident and emergency..

If this is true this is awful, it’s the T word all over again.  We know how damaging Targets can be, we’ve all suffered them, and has anyone apart from management actually benefited from them?  My doctor’s surgery has a target to give you an appointment within so many days of requesting one.  For that reason I cannot make an appointment for 1 month later when the doctor says “Come back in see me in a  month” I have to wait and take my chances with everyone else, just so the target figures aren’t spoilt.

Neither is it a problem restricted to the West Country

Warwickshire hospitals struggle on ambulance handover

PERFORMANCE: Acute providers in Warwickshire are struggling against targets for emergency admissions and ambulance handovers.

Arden primary care trust cluster’s May performance report shows that South Warwickshire Foundation Trust, University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire Trust both continue to under-perform on ambulance handover, with “significantly less” than 90 per cent of handovers completed in 30 minutes.

Ambulance Watch: Hospital warned over ambulances waiting in the car park

Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital will be fined £70 per hour for ambulance handover delays, which are aimed to be completed within 15 minutes.  The financial penalties have been introduced in an attempt to put pressure on the hospital to improve its times, with commissioners saying the N&N’s poor performance in this area is severely hampering the East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust’s ability to meet its response time targets.

Did I just see the T word again?

Leafy Sussex is no better

Patient handover delays increase at Sussex hospitals

South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) turnaround times take into account the length of time it takes to hand over patients they bring in and preparing the ambulance for the next incident, including cleaning and re-stocking.

It should take 15 minutes to hand over a patient and another 15 minutes to prepare the vehicle.

Any turnaround time taking more than 30 minutes is logged by the service.

However hospitals are under increased pressure, meaning it can sometimes take longer for patients to be transferred from ambulances and into the department, especially at particularly busy times such as Friday nights and weekends.

Figures show more than 2,404 hours were logged at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton in 2009/10 which rose to 2,852 in 2011/2.

Worthing Hospital rose from 1,315 to 1,477 and Eastbourne District General Hospital increased from 3,633 to 4,102.

The Conquest Hospital in St Leonards fell from 2,596 hours to 1,827 while St Richard’s in Chichester dropped from 1,025 to 988.

London is no better

Hospital hand over delays

In December 2011 it was reported:-

Half of our patients taken to hospital have to wait longer than 15 minutes to be assessed in A&E according to our latest figures.

Last week 6,000 patients in London waited longer than the recommended 15 minutes to be seen by hospital staff.

Whilst it isn’t apparently a widespread problem the NHS top brass were forced to issue this letter in June 2012.

What this letter does not mention, and you will have noticed it above, is a Fine System for hospitals exceeding the 15 Minute Rule.  This means that Hospitals not assessing an Ambulance borne patient in A&E within 15 minutes are liable to be fined for each occasion when they fail.  At this pointy I nearly spat out my Mellow Birds.  Never mind the T word, what if the P word comes about.  Can you imagine a privatised scenario?

A&E staff running around like lemmings trying to get everyone seen within 15 minutes or the hospital shareholders will be on the warpath.  Which cartel manages to win the Ambulance contract will be rubbing their corporate hands with glee “That’s another £100 fine we can levy”  It will be like wheel clamping all over again.

But wait!!  It isn’t even that simple.

Picture this, Granny has crushed her left wrist in the mangle.  She’s in a lot of pain, she’s probably broken a couple of the small bones in her wrist, you need an ambulance. Only you can’t get one just yet as they’re all held up a the nearest A&E Department waiting to have their patients assessed and admitted into A&E’s care, freeing them up to come and sort out Granny.

On a less humourous note, the National Audit Office put a figure of approx £4,000,000 wasted by Ambulance Blocking such as this.

Some things are more important than money.

To leave you on a humourous note (if there is one) while I was researching this article I found this. The longest turnaround time was recorded as six hours 39 minutes with the reason given that the ambulance was impounded by the police.

More shenanigans in the great NHS sell off.

My compatriot on the Big Picture has already written a post about Virgin Care this week and this one also features Virgin Care as I summarise some of the latest posts relating to the NHS.

Dr Eoin Clarke reveals that the membership  of the Hartlepool and Stockton Doctors committee (CCG) where doctors will make purchasing decision regarding NHS funds is made up entirely of doctors who have shares in Virgin Care. It will be interesting to see how many new contracts head the way of Virgin care in the coming months – they already have one.

In a separate post Dr Clarke shows that Virgin Care have in fact secured 100% membership of 6 CCG’s at this time.

Dr Clarke also reveals that problems are emerging in Virgin Cares’ contract to run Community Health services in Surrey including cost where it appears Surrey are now paying £18 000 000 more for community initiatives. There are also issues with patient records, patient safety and patient care.

In other news Jim Easton head of NHS performance and efficiency may be about to jump ship and join a private healthcare company ‘Care UK’.

We also learn that the cost of the NHS reforms has now risen by £300 million as announced by Jeremy Hunt in a written statement in the House of Commons.

So there we are a round up of some of this weeks happenings in the UK’s largest sale of public sector assets.

It used to be your NHS – now it seems its all going to belong to private companies!

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive

Let me say right at the outset, so that my position is clear, I used to be a fan of Mr Richard Branson, I admired his entrepreneurial spirit, I admired the was he’s progressed from selling records out of the boot of an old mini and his journey to where her is today.

Today, however, I am not so sure.

I was reading The Green Benches this morning, a blog about Mr Jeremy Hunt and his apparent lies, or inability to stick to his promises, whichever you prefer.  This item makes reference to Virgin Care.  I was aware that Virgin Care existed and that they were involved somewhere in the privatisation of the NHS (or certain facets of it) but I had never really taken any notice of it, but I have now.  I found something I didn’t expect to find.

I started with Who are the Directors of Virgin Care?  The answer was simple for Virgin Care Ltd, but if you check at Companies House you will find that there are 4 more companies whose names begin Virgin Care, and they all have a different permutation of Directors.  Why?  Then I asked myself Who are the shareholders then?  Simple answer = 1, VIRGIN HEALTHCARE HOLDINGS LTD, Why?

Let’s go back to the Directors of Virgin Care Ltd first.  They are

• Dr. Vivienne Margaret McVey
• Mr Edward Bartholomew Johnson

Dr McVey is currently a Director of 11 Companies, none of which disturb me particularly, the majority of them are subsidiaries of the Virgin Brand somewhere.

Mr Johnson is currently a Director of 7 Companies, again most of them linked to Virgin.

That didn’t really take me very far, except I don’t understand why the sole Shareholder of a company is a subsidiary of the same brand.  It may possibly be totally legitimate but I for one don’t get it.  So I had a look at Virgin Healthcare Holdings Ltd, the sole shareholder of Virgin Care Ltd.

There don’t seem to be any Shareholders for this Company, so where does that take us?  There are 6 Directors of this Company, so maybe they are the sum total of shareholders, who knows?  Two of the Directors are Dr McVey and Mr Johnson.

The other four are

• Mr Nicholas Anthony Robert Fox, who has 2 other Directorships, both of which seem quite innocuous.
• Ms Clare Margaret Hollingsworth, who has 4 other Directorships including Macmillan Cancer Care and Eurostar (?!?)
• Mr Patrick Charles Kingdon McCall who is Director of numerous other companies, too many to list here.
• Mr Graham Charles Eccles.  Mr Eccles is somewhat more interesting.  He has only two other current Directorships; Network Rail Ltd, and Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd.  He has previously been a Director of numerous Transport-related companies including Stagecoach and South West Trains.

Now call me old fashioned, but is this not a conflict of interests when Virgin Trains are negotiating for the West Coast Mailnline franchise?  I freely confess that I don’t know the answer but trying to follow Virgin Care’s antecedents has led me to believe that the waters here have been a bit muddied.  I’m a simple soul and I just believe that things should be easy to follow and if they’re not, I want to know why they’re not and are we being deceived somewhere along the way?  Normally the answer to that sadly seems to be YES, but if all is Ticketyboo then I am truly sorry for doubting you Mr Branson.

NHS cancer research is being privatised. In case anyone’s interested. « Pride’s Purge

NHS cancer research is being privatised. In case anyone’s interested. « Pride’s Purge.

A somewhat satirical, but nevertheless, worrying picture of just what is going on in the NHS at the moment.  I always believed that the Royal Marsden would stay in the public domain come what may, now I fear the worst.

How to turn 10 million into 5 billion!

5 billion from 10 million is not a bad return on an investment by anybody’s standards.

Ten private healthcare companies have donated (that word again) 10 million to the conservatives and have been awarded contracts worth 5 billion.

A revealing list from Dr Eoin Clarke via the Green Benches.