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Labour’s BUPA deal ‘depressing’

Health unions have reacted furiously to the Government’s plan to transfer waiting list patients and NHS staff to a hospital run by BUPA.

Health secretary Alan Milburn announced the deal in December on the same day public service unions staged a major rally against privatisation. Later the same week he also announced plans to allow patients on waiting lists for more than six months to seek treatment either privately or abroad.

Under the BUPA deal, patients waiting for diagnostic tests and routine surgery at the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, Redhill, will be treated instead at the BUPA Redwood Hospital. They will be looked after by NHS doctors and nurses effectively transferred from the adjoining East Surrey Hospital. Up to 12,000 patients a year will be seen from next April.

A spokesperson for the trust said the deal effectively meant relocating the existing day unit, which lacked space, into the BUPA hospital. Staff would retain NHS terms and conditions and the BUPA unit would be ‘refurbished’, replacing luxurious single rooms with NHS-style wards. Costs were still being finalised, she said.

But TUC general secretary John Monks said: ‘While temporary measures to ease waiting lists are clearly right, it is not right to give long term contracts to private hospitals, either in the UK or abroad.’

Karen Jennings of UNISON said the timing of the announcement – when public sector workers were celebrating public services – was ‘very, very depressing’.

UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis said using private hospitals or sending patients abroad were only ‘stop-gap’ measures which treated the symptoms not the causes of NHS woes. Long-term use of the private sector would divert resources from front-line care.

UNISON has, however, just secured a landmark agreement with the Government, which will ensure NHS staff transferred to hospitals built under the private finance initiative (PFI) remain NHS employees. The deal will allow work to go ahead at three deadlocked PFI schemes and should be extended to others.

But concerns over PFI and other private links continue. Dexter Whitfield, director of the Centre for Public Services, called for a positive campaign to promote an alternative to privatisation. Speaking at a conference bringing together 80 trade unionists, academics and community campaigners in Leicester, he said campaigning against privatisation would not succeed if it were merely defensive. He advocated an alliance of national and community groups fighting for ‘an alternative modernisation strategy’.