REVEALED: The NHS’s £250M bill for treating patients after private surgery has gone wrong

Most private hospitals can’t handle emergencies so rush patients to A&E — at taxpayers’ expense

Every year around 1.6 million people in this country undergo surgery at a private hospital. While many pay for it themselves, it is estimated that around half of the inpatients are funded by the NHS.

This is done to help clear waiting lists and for these patients in particular, it can seem like they’ve hit the jackpot: going private may seem like the health equivalent of flying first class.

But while the experience should be the best that money can buy, if something goes wrong, private hospital treatment can fall woefully and dangerously short.

While NHS hospitals are equipped with expertly staffed intensive care units, most private hospitals have no such emergency care facilities. So should a patient’s condition suddenly deteriorate or a complication occur, they can end up being rushed to A&e at the nearest NHS hospital.

A report published last October claims that in the past three years alone, more than 100 patients have died after being transferred from private hospitals.

The report was written by Colin Leys, an honorary professor of research at Goldsmiths, University of London. His findings echo those of a British Medical Association report in 2016, which found that up to 6,000 people annually need NHS care after bungled treatment at a private hospital. Around 2,500 of these were classed as emergencies.

This comes at huge personal cost to patients — and at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds to the already cashstrapped NHS.

In Scotland, the issue is particularly sensitive as the SNP campaigned on a platform of no privatisation of the NHS in Scotland. yet Health Secretary Shona robison confirmed that health boards had spent £72million on private and independent healthcare providers in 2016-17. Detail also emerged this week of a £30million deal for the private sector to tackle what Miss robison called ‘short-term capacity issues’.

One of the most telling findings from the new report is that some private hospitals allow surgeons to leave work after they have carried out an operation and be up to 45 minutes’ distance away from the hospital. This means they’re not on site to deal with any complications, a factor in avoidable deaths.

THe report also warns that many private hospitals rely on only a single junior doctor to provide postoperative care for patients. The potential consequences of this are all too real for Carmel Bloom’s family.

Apart from a bothersome kidney stone, Carmel, 54, had been in good health when she went in for surgery to remove thestone at the Bupa-run roding Hospital in Ilford, essex.

But within hours of the operation, her condition deteriorated catastrophically. Carmel, a hospital administrator from Woodford Green, essex, developed sepsis; her blood pressure plummeted and she went into multiple organ failure.

The private hospital’s facilities could not cope with the emergency. Instead it sent her by ambulance to the NHS intensive care unit at Whipps Cross Hospital in east London.

Carmel died there ten days later in September 2002, having never regained consciousness.

DELAY IN GETTING EMERGENCY CARE

IT TOOk 14 long years of campaigning by her brother Bernard, and an unprecedented three coroners’ inquiries, to shed light on what happened. In the last inquest, in late 2016, a coroner heard new evidence about a 999 call from the private hospital, which showed that staff were aware of the seriousness of her condition — that she was unconscious and deteriorating perilously.

The coroner ruled that her death was due in part to ‘the absence of regular monitoring’ after her surgery. She also noted failings in communication between the private hospital nurses, urologist and anaesthetist while Carmel’s condition was worsening.

The private hospital’s consultant urological surgeon did not arrive at her bedside until an hour and 20 minutes after she had been found to have developed life-threatening sepsis and the consultant anaesthetist was not called until two-and-a-half hours after the onset of sepsis. The transfer to the NHS hospital was mismanaged — the coroner ruled that the anaesthetist, ‘did not intubate [insert a tube, typically into the airway] and ventilate Carmel before transferring her, or attach equipment which would have allowed for the monitoring of her vital signs during transfer’.

During the ambulance journey, her blood pressure fell still further, causing the heart attack that fatally starved her brain of oxygen.

Bernard, 68, a luxury car dealer of Chingford, North-east London, told Good Health that the draining legal battle has ruined his own health. He now suffers from debilitatingly high blood pressure.

‘The stress of fighting through the courts, gathering expert evidence from top medics around the world and continually being confronted with setbacks has all taken an awful toll on my health,’ he says.

A spokeswoman for Bupa, which owned roding hospital in 2002, said: ‘We sympathise with Carmel Bloom’s family for their loss.

‘As we no longer own the hospital, it’s not appropriate for us to comment any further.’ you might feel that so manyyears after Carmel’s death, the problem of private hospitals failing to cope with postoperative emergencies would have been addressed by now.

But as Professor Leys’ report reveals, it’s a problem that’s far from gone away.

GIVEN THE WRONG TREATMENT

TAke the tragic story of Mary roddy. Mary, 78, of kearsley, Greater Manchester, was perfectly healthy but suffering with pain in her right knee when she was advised by a consultant surgeon at the royal Bolton Hospital that she could have a knee-replacement operation, funded by the NHS, at a local private hospital.

She was admitted to the BMI Beaumont Hospital in Bolton in 2010. Doctors noted that she was fit and well before carrying out the procedure.

early in the morning after surgery, at around 2am, her blood pressure dropped significantly. Nurses noted that she was drowsy and confused. She was given intravenous fluid to increase her blood pressure. But it was the wrong response, because she had in fact suffered a heart attack that went undetected.

Later that morning at 7am she was seen by a junior doctor who gave her a second dose of intravenous fluid. Mary was finally reviewed by a consultant at 2pm who gave her a third dose of intravenous fluids.

The fluids cumulatively flooded her system and caused heart failure that was only diagnosed at 4pm. She was transferred to the intensive care unit at the royal Bolton Hospital.

But the heart damage caused by the excess fluid was irreparable and she died eight days later.

Her husband John, 77, a retired charity worker, sued the hospital for negligence. ‘I was adamant to take it all the way because I knew they were at fault,’ he said through his solicitors, Linder Myers.

‘By hook or by crook I wanted to get justice for Mary. She was an amazing person and everybody knew her and loved her.’

In 2015, five years after her death,