NHS Pirates, reposted. SERCO is only part of our problem

“Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community” Aneurin Bevan 

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone.” JM Keynes



Virgin Care leads the way in negating the founding principles of the NHS whilst claiming to promote the greatest good. So I will start with them.
Over the past seven years they have been awarded NHS contracts worth over £2 billion. By this year, they were running over 400 NHS services. 
Virgin Care has two arms to its business in the NHS: primary care services, including GP services and community-based NHS services.
In January 2018 Virgin Care Private was launched, opening its first health and wellbeing centre in Birmingham.This centre provides GP services, specialist consultations, diagnostics and tests on a pay-as-you-go service.
The company targets large contracts containing numerous services in the area of community health and social care. Since 2012 they have won these contracts in over seven UK regions.
When Virgin Care has failed to win contacts it has resorted to legal action. The full amount paid to date to Virgin by you and me as taxpayers could be as high as £2.6 million.
Labour MP Paula Sherriff, revealed that when she worked for Virgin Care the company insisted on “extra consultations before surgery, boosting their profits at the expense of the taxpayer and patient safety”.
The parent company, Virgin Group Holdings Ltd, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. Richard Branson and his family hold a £2.7 billion stake in this offshore, tax-free, tax-haven company.
Virgin is just the tip of the scalpel.
NHS Support Federation, reveals that profit-driven companies such as Bupa, Virgin Care and Care UK have in the last four years won more than 130 NHS service contracts worth £2.6bn to provide NHS services. Dr Mark Porter, of the British Medical Association, said: “These figures show the extent of privatisation in the NHS following the pushing through of the Health and Social Care Act. An act that the government denied loud and long would lead to privatisation, has done exactly that. Enforcing competition has not only fragmented services and compromised the delivery of high-quality care, but it is also diverting vital funding away from frontline services to costly, complicated tendering processes, highlighting just how counterproductive the reorganisation has been.”
At the beginning of 2017 private-sector companies had been invited to bid for 14% more NHS contracts than a year previously. According to the Department of Health accounts, the private sector delivered a total of £8.7bn of NHS services for 2015/16, or around 7.6 per cent of the total NHS budget. These figures exclude GP services, dentistry and community pharmacy.
David Hare, chief executive of the Partners Network, which represents private sector providers, has said there was a slow “evolutionary trajectory” of greater private sector involvement in the NHS.
So who, alongside Richard Branson and his family, are a part of this trajectory? These are the 'privateers' I have discovered. There are others. 32 to date and counting.

Alliance / Lodestone - Diagnostics for the NHS and independent sector
BDO - Commissioning services for the NHS
BMI - You can now choose to have your NHS treatment at a BMI Healthcare hospital
BUPA - The biggest private healthcare company which takes your money and then depends on the NHS to carry out expensive treatments.
Capio - Free family practice services if registered with them.
Capita - IT, patient engagement, HR, payroll, commissioning services.
Cap Gemine – NHS programme management and technical expertise.
Care UK - Day care and homes for elderly. GP services, diagnostics, treatment centres, mental health services learning disability services.
Centene - IT, digital technologies for NHS.
Circle UK - Large community care contracts and is the first private company to run an NHS hospital – Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire.
Classic Care - homecare services.
Diaverum UK Ltd - kidney services in partnership with the NHS.
Exel Europe Ltd - consumer procurables acquired for NHS.
Facilities First LLP - pathology services to NHS Foundation Trusts.

Gemini - IT support for NHS
General Healthcare - a private specialist in fertility treatment.
HCA International - Through US companies Tenet Healthcare and Aspen Healthcare provide “opportunities to work with and support the NHS.
IBM - Electronic staff records services to NHS, payroll, pensions and other human resources functions.
InHealth Group - diagnostics for NHS throughout the UK.
McKesson - IT support
Mouchel - Commissioning services.
Nector Primecare - Home care, care homes, mental health services, children’s services, out-of-hours, dentistry and primary care.
Netcare - Clinics set up iby South African company, which works under contract to the NHS.
Optimum - part of of US United Health Group which works with the NHS to provide services such as contract negotiations and medication management.
Partnership in Care – Working with NHS as provider of secure mental health facilities across the UK. Working with the NHS.
Pathology First LLP - pathology services to NHS Foundation Trusts.
The Practice - 75% owned by US company Centene, providing primary care services and specialist clinical services to GPs.
Priory Group - Provider of acute mental health care, complex care and neuro-rehabilitation services, fostering and care homes.
Ramsay UK - 22 hospitals in the UK delivering both private treatment and care under contract to the NHS 
Serco with an annual turnover in excess of £3 bn, it operates prisons and immigration detention centres, provides support to the military and manages healthcare facilities.

Spite Classic - Second largest private healthcare hospital group in the UK with 37 hospitals; NHS admissions accounting for 25% of its business.
Totally PLC - Working with the NHS including physiotherapy, podiatry, dermatology, referral management services and clinical health coaching.
United Health/Optum - Health needs assessment, GP Commissioning, performance & contract management, Medicines management.

An historical note on pirates: Richard Branson has a home on Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Isles. In the 17th century these islands were a centre of piracy. Yes I know peg-legged, one-eyed, walk-the-plank buccaneers. The truth is the 'pirates' were often escaped black slaves who set up a Pirate's Republic in the area. The Jack Sparrow / Jonny Depp characterisation is myth which has become reality in our times with the arrival of the real Jack Sparrow in the form of Richard Branson.

Redemption Song

`The Calabash tree 2

“For four hours I was away and out of my body, made to die then jerked back to the world.” (from a poem by Robin Robertson, who had same operation as me).

from: Feb 2018

I recently had open heart surgery at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. A traumatic experience, but one which has left me deeply grateful for the NHS – massively complex and intricate surgery and after-care – carried out with extraordinary skill, care and attention and FREE.

In my recent article for The London Economic I wrote about the creeping privatisation of the NHS. Here I want to highlight the NHS at it best. A health system based in Aneurin Bevan's words on the principle that “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”

I am lucky to be a citizen of a country that can offer me the medical procedures I underwent that have kept me alive. For me, it is second time lucky. Three years ago I had brain surgery that would not have been possible in the past and remains, as does the heart procedure, an impossibility for much of the world's population.

We need to bear this in mind as we fight for our NHS against the privatisers. They are creeping in through the cracks in our defences. As recentlyl as five months ago, Barts were responsible for their own catering. One nurse told me what pride he took in serving food to his patients and how this was a central part of nursing care. Today this has been handed to Serco, who run our prisons and whose annual revenue from healthcare is over £1.4 billion. Breakfast was tepid tea or coffee, cereal or porridge and toast. As I bit into the cold, spongy “toast” I could imagine Serco executives meeting to discuss how to cut back their costs to increase their profits. “Let's start with breakfast”.

I got to know my fellow patients, some with more problems than mine. Barry had already had three heart operations when he arrived at Barts in January for his fourth. His operation lasted 28 hours and they “lost” him three times. He told me of his out of body experiences which had traumatised him and made him scared of going to sleep. He badly needed psychological care, but with the present level of cuts in NHS funding, this is not available.

Just as food is important to getting better, so is after care.There was a time when post-operative patients would spend time in convalescent hospitals. No more. In Germany and even in the countries of Eastern Europe where I used to live, all operations included a minimum of one month's post-op stay in a health spa.

We not only have to fight for our NHS, but have to claw back what has already been scalpelled away and hived off to the Richard Bransons of this world.

What memories do I take away from the time I spent at Barts? Not the operation and its after-effects of pain and worry, but the nursing care I received with such commitment and humour. The nurse pushing my bed down a corridor who I got chatting to. On hearing I was a writer, he brought my bed to a halt and with a wonderful smile quoted verbatim from Gabriel García Márquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera:' “Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”
Then there was the nurse replacing my chest bandage who wanted me to breath in deeply. “Puff out your chest”, she said, 'like a Robin Redbreast.'
Barry, a Jamaican living in Finsbury Park, would chat to the patient beside him, a Trinidadian from West London, about their youthful memories of their island homes and their love of the calabash tree, its soft brown bark home to multi-coloured orchids. They told me that these trees, pollinated by bats, grow on hillside pastures, along roadsides and wherever there are human beings.

The pulp of the fruit has medicinal properties and acts as a remedy for respiratory problems such as asthma, a cure for dysentry, reduces blood pressure, disinfects wounds and is used to treat haematomas and tumours.

The NHS is our Calabash tree. 

To my dead Donor:

Dedicated to Dr Wael Awad, his surgical team, anaesthetist & all nursing / ancillary staff at Barts Ward 4B - in respect for their care & skills 
My blood pump was stopped
while a machine took over 
the job my heart had done 
for almost 73 years. 
A cow's pericardium replaced 
my narrowed, furred valve
that no longer moved like 
a sea anemone's fronds. 
This valve was given without 
agreement or consent
so I made a vow to my dead donor
to never eat beef again.

Last time it was a subdural haematoma.
I escaped with my brain intact. 
That involved an earlier pact, 
made with myself, to act wisely
with attention to my herd.
My plan of action now 
begins with breaking through the fence 
to arrive, together, in greener pastures.

(David Wilson & Anne Aylor)

Left Field