Private hospital group aims to delay care for NHS patinets to get them to pay more for private care

The Independent reported in July that an executive director of BMI hospitals (this is Bernie Creaven, just so that the face and name become as widely known as possible) told its consultants to delay NHS patients' admission for treatment on the NHS contracts to encourage them to go private (and make BMI more money).

Apparently the poor diddums are not making enough money because NHS waiting lists are too low, so they're keen to get back to the position during the last Conservative government in which waiting lists were so long that people were forced to spend their money on private care. It's another way in which the government hopes to cut the cost of the NHS by co-payment (the jargon for making people pay some of the costs), just as all government have been doing over the past thirty years by transferring as much care as possible into social care.

And all this, of course, affects older people most, because they are more likely to need routine 'elective' healthcare. It's not elective if you are can't carry on with your life because you are in pain; that's something that the government hopes younger people won't think about when they vote because they don't have to live with 'multiple co-morbidities' (the jargon for  having a lot of minor disabilities wrong with you that make your life miserable but don't actually kill you).

The government is going to tell BMI healthcare not to do this. I suspect they are going to have to get their regulators to do a lot of chasing round to put a stop to this sot of thing as the new NHS emerges. In my blog on 'big society' policy, I have pointed out that big companies take over government projects because true community organisations work have locally, and can't and don't want to 'scale up' to run a giant programme.  Examples are A4e, the company that are making a lot of money out of the work programme for unemployed people, and Serco, the profit-makers who are bidding to take over the National Citizen Service, the volunteer programme for young people which is being piloted at the moment (and aims to find unemployed youngsters something to do). These big organisations are interested in their profits. I'm calling them the 'big privates'.

As Ms Creaven has clearly demonstrated, the profits are more important than the best service for patients. The private healthcare providers have big privates, too, it seems.

Link to The Independent report.