Which PR companies are actively promoting image of a failing NHS to facilitate privatisation?

[Bernie Gunther]

Ton of good stuff here on this kind of thing.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/by/colin-leys/

 

[Hocus Eye.]

Bernie, thanks for this thread (and the link above). This stuff needs to be known about. It is difficult to see how to counter expensively paid for propaganda from people with access to government who just see the NHS as a big fat prize. The first stage is to publicise what is happening using the internet as the mainstream media are part of the problem.

Sadly there is no political party that will stand up for the NHS as a state owned, state controlled organisation. I am very distressed by this although it was seen long ago what could happen. There has been no public discussion of the whole issue, just as there was no public discussion of the changes to education of a similar nature that happened over the same number of years, going back before Blair and through his period in charge.

All of these changes take public services off the books but the irony is that paying for the private corporations that do or will run them comes down to the taxpayer who will have to pay for the profit margins of those corporations. In this way what are called cuts result in greater costs to say nothing of the reduction in quality of the services. It will be very bad news for anyone working in the health or education sectors as the companies try to increase their profits by cutting salaries. I hope their trade unions are up to scratch.

 

[The Pale King]

The latest Eye (1339, the UKIP Clowns one) has a particularly nefarious example of this with regards to the forthcoming selloff of East Coast trains, in which the minister Simon Burns claimed that East Coast was the worst performing of all 19 franchises, based on the "latest data" in terms of punctuality and reliability.

This turned out to be the statistics from one month, the statistics for the year to March 31st actually showed that EC was the best performing (61.1% of trains punctual to within a minute of the schedule compared to the next best (Virgin) with 49.4%). EC also claims - by some distance - the least amount of subsidy of any franchise.

Yeah I saw that as well. Astoundingly cynical!

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Computer Weekly are doing some good stuff on what a cynical person might suspect was a pattern of rapidly escalating systematic abuse of NHS data for pro-privatisation propaganda purposes.

Computer Weekly spent days at the time trying to learn from the Department of Health and NHS Commissioning board what exactly had been mandated. They were not entirely sure. They insisted it meant all hospitals get working patient records systems in the space of a year. Then they back-tracked. The coalition government may have done an even worse job at kitting the NHS out with patient systems than the last lot had.

So scrub that, they said. What we meant was patient outcomes data: all hospitals must be in a position to share patient outcomes data by 2014.

But they already are. They already do.

The same bafflement serves as a suitable vantage to view the Keogh review. His position was predicated on a myth he continued to peddle when new regime started business this week: that the Mid-Staffs scandal was about hospitals refusing to give proper credence to his death statistics.

The precedent his data has since set - for Mid-Staffs, for Leeds, and perhaps also for Basildon and the others now under review - was false: false conclusions, drawn excitedly from data that was of limited use.

Yet that is the basis on which the NHS data regime has opened for business, thanks to the constant drip of scandalous interpretations of health data from Dr Foster, the company formed by Tim Kelsey, Keogh's compadre at the NHS Commissioning Board, and Professor Brian Jarman, Kelsey's colleague at Dr Foster.

Public outrage over the data regime's horrible founding fallacies has created space for it to change the rules. It has used that space to change the organizational meaning of data.

Thus the Commissioning Board has confiscated from hospitals the power to determine what their own data says about their healthcare, and how it should be acted upon. Keogh's rapid suspension of operations at Leeds, no matter how dreadfully mistaken, suggests how the new regime may wield the power it has taken.

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/04/data-regime-makes-merciless-st.html

Computer Weekly understands that on 27 March 2013 Keogh breached data safeguards to ask Boyle to send preliminary Nicor data he could use to single out Leeds General Infirmary.<snip>

Keogh told them the data meant they should suspend the heart unit. Hospital managers complied for the sake of safety. But they were doubtful because Keogh had not shown them any real data, said the source. What the graph told them also conflicted with what they knew about their own hospital - that there had been no dramatic increase in deaths of children undergoing heart operations. <snip>

A spokeswoman for NHS England said Keogh was not ready to answer questions about the decision. Computer Weekly asked for answers about the story Greg Mulholland read out in Parliament.

Computer Weekly asked why Keogh had been unable to say how – with his experience as founder of Nicor and his familiarity with the procedures around the collection and verification of Nicor data – he did not see what other Nicor experts said was the data's obvious flaws. Nor was Keogh able to say why he had not waited for routine verification before acting on the data.

It is also unclear why Keogh sought to use death statistics that were about to be routinely verified by Nicor data experts. It remains to be explained why he would then have concealed all but a single, paper print-out from managers at the hospital – and persuade them to suspend operations – when the Nicor experts quickly verified the data was wrong. It is also unclear why Keogh blamed the hospital for supplying incomplete data when routine collection was still being completed.

A spokeswoman for Nicor would not clarify how much of its data collection and verification procedures had been influenced by Keogh himself. The medical director had been a pioneer in the development of heart surgery in work that had grown from the mid-1990s into Nicor itself.

Nicor was conducting its own investigation of what happened and would not comment until it was complete, she said.

The incident is the latest in a string of reports questioning the use of data that have stemmed from the Francis Inquiry into deaths of patients at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. NHS England is increasingly using data to check on the performance of hospitals across the health service.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/...after-Computer-Weekly-reveals-NHS-data-misuse

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The activities of the Dr Foster 'health intelligence' organisation mentioned above, beg the question of whether it too acts a PR front group pushing out anti-NHS horror stories.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...th-news/the-mysterious-dr-foster-1831647.html

It could be argued that they simply provided the data that kicked off the Staffs scare and that the data was creatively misinterpreted by others. (N.B. the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial is sponsored by, but not the same thing as the company Dr Foster Intelligence)

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/03/data-fear-caused-mid-staffs-pa.html

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/03/inquiry-behind-nhs-scandal-omi.html

As you can see from the following Spinwatch entry, Dr Foster Intelligence has, along with General Healthcare Group, funded the free-market think tank Reform's pro-privatisation papers on health care reform.

General Healthcare Group believes that the Government should "incentivise people to pay directly for healthcare themselves," and that it "should also remove the barriers to people topping up their NHS allowance if they wished to buy additional services or treatment."

In October 2001 The Times reported having seen a strategy document for the future think-tank which stated that it would be modelled closely on Washington’s Heritage Foundation

http://mail.spinwatch.org/index.php/Reform

see also

http://mail.spinwatch.org/index.php/Private_Healthcare_Network_Map

 

[yield]

Great work Bernie.

I'm also wondering about Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA). They gave evidence at the second Mid-Staffs inquiry in 2011.

AvMA on the charities commision.

On 19 January 2011 the charity was left a property, 187 Gloucester Place, London NW1 6BU, as part of a larger legacy. The probate value of the property was £2,250,000 and the property was subsequently sold on 5 April 2011 for the amount in the balance sheet after costs incurred and was classified as 'Property held for resale' in the 2011 accounts. The proceeds are currently invested in a one month notice deposit account awaiting investment in longer term funds as recommended by the charity's Independent Financial Adviser.

That's a lot of money for such a small charity.

To be fair they're against The Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill and The Health & Social Care Bill although they sounds like a load of ambulance chasers.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I'm starting to get the idea that at least some of these outfits acting as PR front groups for the NHS privatisation lobby are a bit more ambiguous than say the Exxon-sponsored climate-change denial PR front-groups.

That is to say, they're not simply telling outright lies the way the older generation of PR front groups did. They're part of a wider spin network, and can function as such by simply providing data for others to cherry-pick and spin as seems to have happened with the Mid-Staffs case.

What's particularly disturbing is that that stuff in the first Computer Weekly link in which the Department of Health and NHS Commissioning Board effectively bans hospitals from using their own data, in case they use it to demonstrate that the Department of Health itself is now actively functioning as a PR front group spreading pro-privatisation disinformation about the NHS against the public interest.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Some more on the role of McKinsey in facilitating the corporate looting of the NHS.

RECENT ISSUES IN RELATION TO HEALTH POLICY: McKinsey, the Revolving Door (and Corporate Capture of DH)

26. McKinsey has long been associated with market-driven reforms of the health service. This latest—and most radical—round of reforms are no exception.

27. McKinsey’s involvement extends from helping to craft national policy in the Department of Health, to designing programmes to implement the reforms on the ground. Today, it advises everyone from the prime minister, NHS management board, the regulator Monitor, regional bodies, and foundation trusts.

28. At the very local level, McKinsey has also won contracts to provide commissioning support for at least 25 of the new GP consortia. This presents McKinsey with a potential conflict of interest, given its involvement in the design of the NHS Commissioning Board.

29. It has earned at least £13.8 million from Government health policy since the Coalition took office.

30. McKinsey maintains a database of ex-McKinsey-ites, or its alumni network as it calls it, which is exploited to further its influence.

31. David Bennett and Adrian Masters, respectively chair of Monitor and its director of strategy, are both ex-McKinsey. As reported in the Mail on Sunday, both have enjoyed many benefits from their old employer.28

32. Bennett has received trips and dinners worth £6,500 from McKinsey since May last year. In June 2011 alone, he enjoyed a two-day trip to New York and a £250-a-head dinner as a guest of McKinsey’s Penny Dash at the Health Investor Awards.29 As well as being ex-head of strategy at the Department of Health, Dash is also a former director of Monitor.

33. Other senior officials to have passed through the “revolving door” between McKinsey and the NHS include: Tom Kibasi who started at McKinsey in 2004, left two years later to become Senior Policy Advisor to chief executive of the NHS David Nicholson, and moved back to McKinsey in 2008, where he’s been busy helping the DH reform the system;30 David Cox, who worked in the NHS, jumped ship to McKinsey, then moved to the Conservative Party’s “Implementation team” for nine months, before settling at NHS London as “Strategy Manager” responsible for “cutting-edge system-wide design and planning of London’s healthcare system strategy”;31 ex-NHS hospital chiefs like Mark Goldman who is now an adviser for the McKinsey Hospital Institute, (which contracts its services to NHS hospitals); ex-McKinsey consultant Nick Moberly who is now CEO of Royal Surrey County Hospital; Dr Doug Russell, ex-medical director of Tower Hamlets and now senior advisor to McKinsey. The list goes on.

34. Such links can help generate further contracts. In May 2011, McKinsey emailed Mr Masters at Monitor, saying: “Would you be happy to provide a reference (on behalf of McKinsey) for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Trust who are looking for a two-year contract to support the development of the Board?”

35. Mr Masters’s office replied: “Adrian is happy to provide a reference for the policy work but he wouldn’t want it to be inferred that he had been involved in any application decisions.”

36. McKinsey’s close ties to DH could prove invaluable for its private health clients. So has the firm been exploiting its privileged access?

37. An email from an unnamed McKinsey executive from May 2010, suggests it has. It states: “We have been gathering our thinking on the implications of the new Government programme for the NHS (and) have started to share this with clients. Would you like to meet to discuss it?”

38. The recipient of the email? Monitor’s Mr Bennett, whose role is to police the relationship between the private and public sectors.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubadm/404/404we05.htm

See also:

http://falseeconomy.org.uk/outsourcing/mckinsey

 

[yield]

What's particularly disturbing is that that stuff in the first Computer Weekly link in which the Department of Health and NHS Commissioning Board effectively bans hospitals from using their own data, in case they use it to demonstrate that the Department of Health itself is now actively functioning as a PR front group spreading pro-privatisation disinformation about the NHS against the public interest.

Which makes me think The Health Foundation maybe involved too. I wonder what the terms were for their grant to the Patients Association?

 

[yield]

AvMA organise
The 25th Annual Clinical Negligence Conference
21-22 June 2013, Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds
Charity Golf Day & Welcome Reception 20 June

There's a list of sponsors at the bottom of the page. Looks like lawyers mainly.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Here's some more explicitly about DoH revolving doors and PR companies. Specifically MHP Communications. (whose health sector client list is ... interesting)

the Bureau looked at the links between Bill Morgan - the Department of Health’s top special adviser on policy development – and his previous employers.

Mr Morgan came to Lansley’s office in July 2010 having been director for the health arm of Mandate Communications, a public relations company which has since merged with MHP communications. <snip>

On its website, however, MHP notes Mr Morgan’s potential for linking the interests of its clients with government policy.

A former colleague of Morgan’s announced the special adviser’s move to the DoH saying, ‘Health Mandate’s clients and our team of consultants have obviously benefited from Bill’s insights into the direction of Conservative policy. Now, as he prepares to take up a new role, we look forward to continuing to be at the heart of the major policy debates which will shape the future of the NHS.’

And DoH’s hospitality records show that in October 2010 Mr Morgan attended a breakfast meeting with representatives from Health Mandate.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: ‘The breakfast meeting hosted by Mandate was between Mr Morgan and a range of healthcare stakeholders, including several charities, to update them on the government’s NHS plans. He has undertaken similar engagements hosted by other organisations.’

Mr Morgan’s departmental hospitality records show meetings with other companies and organisations, however Mandate are the only public relations company logged.

MHP represents various private health agencies too and was recently reported to be stepping up its focus on NHS commissioning processes and engaging more closely with GPs, tying nicely with the DoH’s Health and Social Care Bill.

Earlier this year lobbying watchdog Spinwatch revealed leaked emails between Morgan and private healthcare company, Tribal, which appeared to be providing the DoH with a list of pro-privitisation GPs to help convince ministers and the public of the need for further NHS privatisation.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.co...ealthy-friendships-with-department-of-health/

An outsourcing company that hopes to make millions of pounds from the most radical shake up of the NHS is secretly providing the government with apparently independent GPs to help ministers sell their controversial reform to patients and staff.

Internal emails obtained by SpinWatch show that the arrangement was agreed just before Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, launched his bill last month to scrap primary care trusts and hand £80bn of the NHS budget to GPs and private health companies.

Tribal, the outsourcing firm with £150m worth of government contracts, supplied a list of friendly GPs to Bill Morgan, Lansley’s special adviser. Morgan is a former lobbyist for private health companies and Tribal confirms that it was in discussions with some of the GPs on the list about future lucrative contracts.

Pro-reform GPs are a key front in the public relations offensive behind Lansley’s health and social care bill, which is currently going through parliament.

http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/health/item/475-revealed-government-secretly-uses-doctors-to-spin-tribal-war-for-nhs-hearts-and-minds-oh-and-£80-billion

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Which makes me think The Health Foundation maybe involved too. I wonder what the terms were for their grant to the Patients Association?

It was explicitly to focus on their Mid-Staffs project I think. A project aimed at improving their ability to handle patient complaints.

Of course, this would perhaps also involve collecting lots of unpleasant anecdotes which just happen to be highly serviceable for hostile PR use as part of the pro-privatisation propaganda witch-hunt that was being conducted against Mid-Staffs on the basis of dodgy evidence.

Anecdotes very like the ones prominently featured in the first Francis Report ....

The Francis Inquiry into Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust omitted key data showing how the hospital made drastic improvements immediately after it was warned that its death rate had risen alarmingly in 2007.

The data contradicts a key finding of the Inquiry, which was that Mid-Staffs did not give enough credence to the 2007 warning and did not respond to it quickly enough.

It raises serious questions about the reliability of the conclusions reached by Robert Francis QC, the medical negligence lawyer who conducted the inquiry. And while the grossly misrepresented statistical records of deaths at the heart of the Inquiry continue to be linked by members of the coalition government to the fact that the NHS is a public body, their consequent calls for reform rely on incomplete evidence and false conclusions. <snip>

As Robert Francis QC, the clinical negligence lawyer who conducted the Mid-Staffs Inquiry, said in his final report last month: "Unjustifiable conclusions continue to be drawn from the numbers of deaths at hospitals and about the number of avoidable deaths". <snip>

Inquiry behind NHS scandal omitted crucial information

Francis' first report from the Inquiry repeated numerous tragic anecdotes of neglect and error, many of which ended when the patient died. There were delays in treatment, misdiagnosis, understaffed wards, people left without water, or with so little attention that they had no choice but to use their beds as toilets.

These incidents created a terrifying picture that led to those unjustifiable conclusions about avoidable deaths that Robert Francis was at pains to avoid.

Data Fear Caused Mid-Staffs Panic

Purely a coincidence I'm sure ...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The echo-chamber effect familiar from the corporate climate-change and tobacco disinformation campaigns is also sadly evident.

You can see something that looks very like a bunch of corporate looters consciously trying to build up such an effect in their efforts to recruit GPs sympathetic to privatisation as shills, in placing their staff as "advisers" to the relevant ministers, in funding patient advocacy groups that can be used to astroturf up "grassroots" support and to collect scare stories, in funding NHS "reform" think tanks and medical "intelligence" companies which provide opportunities for cherry-picking data to create scare stories with as well as the usual PR activities of placing smears in the press to sow panic and distrust.

The genuine fears of ordinary people, typically reflecting a reality where government imposed resource issues are the root of any actual problems, are being cynically manipulated and used to demonize the NHS and its staff in order to facilitate corporate looting.

When I wrote my first post exposing the flaws in the ‘HSMR’ mortality statistics that appeared to identify ‘excess’ mortality at Stafford hospital, and exposing the even bigger flaws in the way that the incorrect conclusions were seized and promulgated by the media and some politicians, I knew I was putting my head above the parapet and was likely to get shot at from some quarters.

It’s been an interesting couple of months since then, with a number of accusations and a fair amount of diatribe coming from certain patients’ groups that were offended that I questioned their position.

Not their personal experiences, but their claims that poor care led to ‘hundreds of needless deaths’ at Stafford hospital (it didn’t), and their wider agenda that has allowed them to be exploited by unscrupulous politicians who find a falsely-damning impression of Mid Staffs a useful weapon to wield against the NHS to justify the targeting and closure of other hospitals.

A lot of this discussion has taken place on Twitter. One of the most constant refrains (apart from the idea that questioning statistics is somehow disrespecting the dead) has been the supposed ‘fact’ that the poor care at Stafford was caused in large part by an ‘uncaring’, ‘callous’ or ‘heartless’ attitude on the part of nurses.

The constant repetition of this leitmotif has fooled some people into demonising nurses at the hospital, leading to numerous instances of verbal and even physical assault against them, with nurses being spat upon and called ‘murderer’ in the street, even in front of their young children. That this is unjustified is something I’ve already written about, and I spent a very moving couple of hours hearing passionate, compassionate nurses relate their experiences through tears.

http://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/nursing-callousness-context-is-everything/

 

[Streathamite]

I don't know if anyone's seen this, but Cameron's now put an anti-NHS lobbyist into No 10 as lead adviser on health policy:
http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-cant-go-on-like-this-cameron-hires.html

Today, Number 10 will welcome former lobbyist Nick Seddon into the heart of Downing Street, as his health adviser. Seddon’s last role was as deputy director of ‘Reform’ - a free market think tank extensively funded by healthcare and insurance companies. He has openly called for an end to the NHS as we know it, and promoted the idea of an insurance-based system.
Before joining Reform, Nick Seddon was head of communications at private healthcare company Circle - the first company to take over the running of a NHS hospital.
His role during the passage of the Health and Social Care bill was to lobby key people to defend competition in the bill. His reward? A place in Cameron’s health policy unit, developing policies for the 2015 general election. In David Cameron’s own words, “We can’t go on like this”.

Now, what was that remark about foxes and henhouses?

 

[William of Walworth]

The Patient's Association. Ostensibly a patient advocacy group, but sponsored by private health care companies. One of the sources of stories attacking the NHS in the media.

http://www.patients-association.com/Default.aspx?tabid=78

Taxpayers Alliance-alikes. Astroturf central!

Thanks for all these links Bernie and everyone. I tend to refuse to even listen to any anti-NHS stories in the media. Call that extreme overkill, but I avoid them on the grounds that anecdote-based NHS-bashing stories, and there'll always be some**, serve the agendas of vested interests. This thread provides a lot more proof of that than I was aware of.

**Because people happy with their experience of the NHS (eg me) don't speak out enough and won't provide any nice juicy scandalous headlines

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I don't know if anyone's seen this, but Cameron's now put an anti-NHS lobbyist into No 10 as lead adviser on health policy:
http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-cant-go-on-like-this-cameron-hires.html


Now, what was that remark about foxes and henhouses?

Cameron really might as well put up a sign saying 'public services privatized in return for large bags of used notes and/or quality charlie'

He's so fucking shameless about it.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

McKinsey has about 9,000 consultants in 55 countries, working with more than 90 per cent of the 100 leading global corporations and two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 list of companies. Forbes estimated the firm’s 2009 revenues at £4 billion. It consults for rival firms at the same time, and while it maintains that its left hand doesn’t tell the right hand what it is doing, this is widely disputed. It has certainly offered to share information gained from its work on privatisation for the Department of Health with private health companies seeking business from the department, as revealed in emails obtained by Spinwatch under the Freedom of Information Act.

Each of the firm’s 400 senior partners is estimated to make between £3 million and £6 million a year, and ‘junior directors’ over £1 million. Partners and other McKinsey staff regularly take senior jobs inside government. Dr David Bennett, a former senior partner, became chief of policy and strategy for Tony Blair from 2005 to 2007, and is now chairman and acting chief executive of Monitor, which will regulate the new healthcare market and play a crucial role in offering NHS business to private companies.

Dr Penny Dash was the Department of Health’s head of strategy from 2000 and a key author of the NHS Plan that set in train New Labour’s privatisation agenda. She subsequently became a McKinsey partner and played the lead role in producing New Labour’s two Darzi reports, the first of which sought to radically restrict levels of provision and staffing in London, while the second envisaged a system of privately owned polyclinics across the nation, under the guise of patient-friendly ‘clinical leadership’. In 2004 she set up the Cambridge Health Network, a McKinsey front that brings together departmental policy-makers with corporate executives at meetings sponsored by McKinsey client companies, from Halliburton to General Electric.

Besides penetrating the government McKinsey also plays a key role in the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust, the two dominant healthcare think tanks that have pushed the privatisation agenda. Both have senior McKinsey partners on their boards, and while they portray themselves as ‘independent’ they routinely endorse models of care that replicate the US health system – especially the concept of ‘integrated care’, which, while sounding progressive, points towards the US model of ‘managed care’, with its high insurance premiums, exorbitant CEO salaries and denial of care.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/mckinseys-unhealthy-profits/

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The battle is on for the future of the NHS. Apparently.

<snip>

Like pro-wrestling, it’s a good show, but a phony fight.

How can you tell?

Just look at the players sitting round the table.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/tamasin-cave/privatising-cabal-at-heart-of-our-nhs

 

[Sasaferrato]

Damn good thing too! Cool that it eventually got taken on board!

Swabs used in operating theatres have had an x-ray detectable 'stripe' for as long as I can remember, and I first set foot in an operating theatre 44 years ago.