Rise of NHS privatisation as company treats 1,200
A SCOTS health board has appointed a private company to treat 1,200 dermatology patients.
Earlier this month, NHS Grampian hired a firm to tend to 200 of its neurology patients.
While these latest contracts are intended to help tackle waiting lists, they fly in the face of repeated vows by Nicola Sturgeon and her Government that NHS Scotland should be free of private sector involvement.
Scottish Tory health spokesman Miles Briggs said: ‘The SNP never tires of saying how opposed it is to the use of the independent care sector. Yet under its stewardship, health boards are repeatedly having to use private companies to clean up the Nationalists’ mess. It’s hypocrisy of the worst kind.
‘There is nothing at all wrong with health boards calling on help in this way, but it is wrong for the SNP to pretend it is against such measures.’
NHS Grampian has awarded a £108,000 contract to The Aberdeen Clinic. It will see doctors and nurses, some of them NHS employees working on days off, providing dermatology appointments for 1,200 patients.
A £36,000 contract was earlier given to Dunfermline-based Synaptik to provide outpatient appointments for 200 patients.
Former NHS surgeon Ken Park, now clinical director of The Aberdeen Clinic, said it treated several thousand NHS patients a year.
Asked if his firm was doing more NHS work, he said: ‘Yes, we are.’ He added that he thought the NHS ‘probably is’ increasingly using such companies.
Mr Park added: ‘We’re trying to take the simple things off the NHS waiting list so the NHS can spend time with more complex cases that may need a bit more intervention.’ Synaptik declined to comment. NHS Grampian said: ‘We only approach private providers when all NHS options have been exhausted. They provide us with additional capacity for a fixed term which enables us to clear waiting lists. How quickly patients will be seen will depend on the speciality involved and the nature of the condition.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘The use of the independent sector by the NHS to address shortterm capacity issues represents 0.6 per cent of overall health investment in Scotland, compared to 7.3 per cent in NHS England.
‘We recently launched our £850 million Waiting Times Improvement Plan, which will reduce the use of the independent sector in the long term.’
‘It’s hypocrisy of the worst kind’