Health News Blog

Subcos: Campaign victory!
A subco is where an NHS trust creates a wholly owned subsidiary company to avoid tax and to threaten staff terms and conditions. The government announced that will now only be approved “in a limited number of circumstances, and only when there is clear union support”. In effect, never.

Who pays for NHSE redundancies?
The Chancellor is resisting demands from Streeting to use more than £1 billion from the Treasury’s reserve to fund redundancy payments when NHS England is scrapped. The Treasury has declined his request for a loan to pay off staff.

Maternity crisis: How many inquiries does it take?
There's the Shropshire inquiry, the East Kent inquiry, the Leeds inquiry, now there's the 14 trusts inquiry. The NHS is facing an enormous £27 billion bill for maternity failings. We, and they, know it's underfunding and the resulting collapse of staff morale caused by understaffing and bullying management that's the problem.

10 YP: Alternatives to private finance
The 10-Year Health Plan will set up to 300 “neighbourhood health hubs". Trapped by their own borrowing rules, ministers will resort to private finance to fund them, despite National Audit Office concluding that PF2 (the revised version of PFI) is two to three times more expensive than public finance. Here are sensible alternatives.

£21 billion still to pay on PFI hospital contracts
Existing PFI contracts lock 69 NHS trusts into paying more than £21.1 billion to private companies over the next two decades. So why is Streeting considering using private finance to pay for the proposed neighbourhood clinics?

Will we get the £122m back from PPE Medpro?
PPE Medpro made a £39 million profit on the contract for the gowns that were never used, but now PPE Medpro is in administration. This article suggests it will be difficult to get our money back.

Call for law for crimes against health workers
There were 175 health worker killings in conflict in 2016, rising to 932 in 2024. Now he Royal College of Nursing and British Medical Association have called for action from the UK government to fully back international criminal court prosecutions.

A&E crisis: 'a national emergency'
Society for Acute Medicine “The 15% rise in 12-hour waits in emergency departments is a stark warning that urgent and emergency care across the UK is in a state of national emergency. Nearly 1,500 people every day, often frail and clinically vulnerable, are being left in overcrowded, unsafe environments for far too long."

The impacts of NHS privatisation are .....
Keep Our NHS Public report says privatisation a) adds overheads of contract bureaucracy and legal costs, b) NHS budget pays out for private profit, c) when patients are harmed the  NHS picks up the bill, d) where there's insufficient profit private firms walk away, e) PFI cost the public purse at least seven times as much as their initial build costs.

10 year plan imbeds privatisation
The 10 Year Plan shifts outpatients from publicly owned hospitals to privately funded neighbourhood health centres and commits to contracting out NHS services, embedding privatisation.

Evidence shows she lobbied for Medpro
A short video that reveals Baroness Mone finally admitted she lobbied for and is a beneficiary of the scandalous VIP contract for PPE awarded to Medpro. 

Government's health policy "incoherent"
The government’s health policy is incoherent, lacking in detail and under-resourced, a highly critical report by the Health Foundation has concluded.

PFI mark 2 here we come!
All the indications are that Streeting's Neighbourhood Clinics will be built using a form of PFI. Of previous PFI, the government's own National Audit Office: (NAO) said "future charges that continue until the 2040s amount to £199 billion – money that could finance the entire NHS for 20 months."
In its 2018 report the NAO said "The Treasury Committee ....estimated the cost of a privately financed hospital to be 70% higher than the PSC" (Public Sector Comparator, whereby the government directly raises the capital cost), see page 15.

Need for more GP training posts?
Applications for GP specialty training have nearly doubled in just the last two years, with four out of every five doctors who applied to become GPs unable to do so. But are there enough training posts?

ICB can't afford severance pay
Under instruction from Streeting ICBs are required to cut staff costs by 50%, but they can't afford redundancy payments.