Nottingham Keep Our NHS Public have been campaigning against Circle’s takeover of their hospital services for some time. Now though, there has been a significant development prompting the HSJ to write an article about how the local CCG is embroiled in a legal battle with Circle over a £320m contract.
In response to this news Nottingham KONP have issued the following release, and ask you to join them this Saturday for a march and rally with speakers. Assemble at 11am at the Brian Clough Statue in Nottingham and walk to Sneinton market to rally at 12pm.
Circle Healthcare, the private company currently running the Treatment Centre on the Queens Medical Centre hospital campus has begun court proceedings against the Rushcliffe Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to protect its profits.
Having lost out twice to the Nottingham University Hospitals Trust in the new contract to run Treatment Centre services, Circle is now going to court for a second time, claiming the Trust can’t possibly treat NHS patients for less money and that bringing the contract back in-house would be “unrealistic” and “not in patients’ interests”.
The controversial company has had a number of major failures in the past, including the collapse of acute dermatology services at the Queens Medical Centre hospital after they took over that contract and handing back the contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital near Cambridge in 2015 because they weren’t making enough profit.
Circle allege that the cost of in-house services would be higher due to staff benefiting from “improved NHS terms” – an admission that they are underpaying staff at present – and fail to mention the extent of the profit they have been taking out of the NHS for the past ten years. Both the CCG and NHS Improvement’s regional Director of Finance have approved the in-house bid.
Mike Scott from Nottingham Keep Our NHS Public said:
“This is completely outrageous. Having been fairly beaten to this contract twice by better value public sector bids, Circle have gone to court to try to protect their profits. Their past performance should have been enough to bar them from bidding for any NHS contracts. We will not stand by and watch them take urgently-needed money out of the public sector by the back door. These people only care about profit, not patients. This is nothing short of a national scandal.”
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The cause of the problem is not Circle – like it or not, they are a business not a charity – it is gross incompetence on the part of the NHS executives and government lawyers who are unable to draft a contract properly. Draft your contracts properly and you won’t have a dispute. Simple.
Who in the government is accountable for this negligence?
Who in the government is accountable for all of the wasted legal costs arising from this incompetence?
Oh … surprise surprise … no-one in the government is at fault, it’s all the fault of the nasty contractor that the NHS chose to contract with, via a poorly written contract.
In the private sector a head would roll. In the public sector no-one will be accountable, or worse, they will be prompted out of harms way.
What a disgraceful waste of taxpayers money, all of which could have been avoided if supposedly professional government advisers and executives performed their jobs properly.
The NHS has zero choice – it *has* to contract to “a business, not a charity”. The common factor in all this is the private sectors need to put profit before service,which is what the NHS is.
” The controversial company has had a number of major failures in the past, including the collapse of acute dermatology services at the Queens Medical Centre hospital after they took over that contract and handing back the contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital near Cambridge in 2015 because they weren’t making enough profit. ”
This is at the heart of the failure of govt policies that exclude the notion of public service, paid for by the public. Issues of incompetence in drawing up contracts, legal costs and the inevitable cuts to service levels, staffing etc.flow inevitably from this.