1st June 2026
Private patients rushed back to A&E
A record number of private patients are being blue-lighted back to NHS hospitals for emergency care. Camapigners are warning that taxpayers’ money would be better spent building up NHS hospital capacity, rather than paying profit-making firms to carry out treatments on their behalf.
Consultants hired to plan PFI
Consultancy firm Turner & Townsend has been awarded the contract, worth £735,000, to provide technical expertise on the programme’s design, cost management, and risk allocation. See also the BMA’s concern about the contract. The DHSC previously awarded contracts worth £3m each to management consultants Deloitte and lawyers Addleshaw Goddard to advise them on whether to use PPPs to build Streeting’s new Neighbourhood centres.
£1.8 million to get ‘the right culture’
The Department of Health and Social Care is paying a management consultancy £1.8m to help it “create and drive the right target culture” and to advise on “pay strategy” as it absorbs NHS England. Some people think abolishing NHS England was ill-advised.
Private equity buys our IT systems provider
An American private equity firm has bought the company supplying more than half of England’s primary care IT systems. Private equity firm TPG confirmed as new owner of Optum UK, that owns EMIS, that itself supplies more than half of England’s GP surgeries with their IT systems.
Hedge fund to buy Spire Healthcare?
Spire operates 38 private hospitals and more than 60 clinics across Britain and delivered care to 1.36 million patients in 2025. It was founded in 2007 through the acquisition and rebranding of 25 Bupa hospitals. Spire’s board has backed a buyout proposal worth £1bn from its second biggest shareholder, a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler”, sending its shares soaring by nearly 50%.
Palantir staff can access patient data
The government has confirmed it is allowing staff from Palantir access to patient data following a change in policy. A document released by NHS England says that Palantir staff can get a new “admin” role and access the NDIT, a data repository for patient data before it is transferred to the “pseudonymized” analytics system and its identifiable patient data.