Oh great, the NHS equivalent of Cobbles has arrived.
Bringing in competitive tension is not about handing money over to the private sector. If everyone competes you get the best value. The only danger is that you are not asking them to provide the right things. It's a common theme in many sectors that the contract does not reflect the needs, which is why you need to invest the staff to oversee these contractors adequetly.
What utter rubbish. To take
one example, the
ISTC programme was set up with the full knowledge that (a) the ISTC cost of operations would generally be 10-15% higher than the NHS cost and (b) that the state would pay for both operations that didnt take place (£200 million according to Eye #1244) and is committed to buying the ISTC premises anyway (another £200 million). Competition in the NHS is only about handing money over to the private sector - who do you think they are competing against, in the main?
Narcylad said:
If I am honest, I would rather a private company makes a profit out of providing good services to the NHS than to some GPs, especially the ones that open for a mere 13 hours per week and drive around in £60k motors. A survey out today said that the average wage of a contract holding GP was £105k, whereas a salaried one was circa £57. It's not rocket science to work out that getting a private company in that has 10 salaried GPs will be cheaper and free up resources to reinvest in the system.
Not really. The GP's contact that has given
some GPs (about a third of them) an annual salary of £100k plus was one of the first ideas of New Labour and demonstrated early on their talent for thinking things through and their demands for getting the best value from our money that they were investing in the PMS system. That said, they were paid that much because they were expected to actually run (as kind of private contractors themselves) their surgeries, not to just be an NHS GP - so you might want to rethink your rich NHS vs cheap private healthcare story.
Of course, as we have grown to expect from a New Labour economic policy it was so successful that the Government had to firstly bring in the GMS system in 2003 (iirc, which had the dual benefit of being less generous to GPs and considerably better thought out), and then started to attack the terms and conditions of PMS contracts, both at the PCT level and through planted media stories about how GPs were caning it in despite doing flip all. This started long before the first private healthcare-run GP surgery came in (May 2006).
There is a good article on the history of PMS, GMS and the varying attitude of the Government
here, and a report on the survey you probably were referring to can be found
here.
Narcylad said:
Only competition can drive down costs and improve quality. That, unfortunately, means inviting the private sector in. But if NHS organisations can meet the challenge then there isn't anything to worry about.
More claptrap. If you want to drive down costs in the NHS then you might want to start with the admin budget, slashing consultancy fees (which
Eye #1244 claim is between £500 - 600 million annually), and abolishing the farce of the internal market.
, very good point Pickmans.
