Superb ‘private’ health care they want to scrap
In a week when the NHS attracted furious front-page headlines for allegedly giving preference to providing drugs to save gay men from the risk of contracting HIV through “unprotected sex” over cataract operations to save the sight of the elderly, it seemed appropriate that I should last Monday have had a cataract operation myself.
On the several visits I have now made to our local “NHS Treatment Centre” in Somerset, I could not have praised its performance more highly. Without exception, from the reception desk to the medical team, the staff of this small modern hospital could not have been more efficient, helpful and cheerful. Free taxis to take me to and from home 10 miles away were available at the ping of a telephone call (and, for those able to drive, parking, in contrast to the exorbitant charges familiar at most other hospitals, is also free).
My two surgeons – one Indian, the other Iranian – could not have been more friendly or competent. And even when a possible complication arose after the operation, I was rushed back in on Friday morning to see a third surgeon, who gave me a superb explanation of what was going on that was wholly reassuring.
All in all, my experience of this Shepton Mallet hospital has been everything any supporter of the NHS could wish for. Many other local people I have spoken to after being treated there for ailing eyes, hips or knees concur, as do testimonials on its website. But even though it describes itself as an “NHS Treatment Centre”, and its writing paper is headed “NHS” in large letters, the small print at the bottom reveals that in fact it is run by a private company, UK Clinical Care Ltd, which turns out to be the largest provider of private health care in the country. In other words it is precisely the kind of business which Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly condemned (he does so yet again elsewhere in these pages), because he says he does not want to see any “private involvement” in the NHS. In fact, closing down such a hospital, providing for free 70 different types of treatment, and at significantly lower cost to the NHS than anything it could itself provide, would, for people living across a large area of the West Country, be an unmitigated disaster.
Opponents of what is scornfully dismissed as the “privatisation” of the health service like to claim that hospitals like this “cream off all the easy bits”, meaning those routine operations which can be costed in advance: not just on cataracts, hips, knees but even replacing heart valves (as happened recently to a friend of mine who was sent at NHS expense for five days of superb treatment and “excellent meals” to his local Nuffield private hospital). This, they complain, unfairly, leaves all the more difficult open-ended forms of treatment to the NHS itself.
But in fact this type of “privatisation” not only frees the NHS to devote more of its resources to those services – such as running A&E departments – which only it is equipped to do: it also saves the NHS budget hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
From every point of view, in fact, not least that of the patients, this “outsourcing” of medical care to people fully capable of providing a top-class service, but still “free at the point of delivery”, is one of the most welcome moves our public health service has ever made.
Only those blinded by ideology – rather than cataracts – could think otherwise.