Vultures circle as NHS falls

Hinchingbrooke in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, lost its only NHS bidder earlier this week in the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, whose withdrawal has opened the way for one of five private health providers to take control.

Once the contract is awarded by the East of England health authority, Hinchingbrooke will become the first NHS hospital of its kind in Britain to be operated by a private firm.

The hospital has been labelled as "debt-ridden" with a deficit of around £40 million, but Unison head of health Karen Jennings claimed the debt is "no worse than many other trusts" which are bogged down in private contracts.

She described plans to hand over the running of the hospital to a private company as a "dangerous experiment" which flew in the face of the government's insistence that the NHS is its preferred provider.

Ms Jennings said: "I have no doubt that they will be itching to get their feet in the door with the thought of more lucrative contracts to come.

"It is frightening to think that we may get a proliferation of these contracts if the Tories are allowed to get into power.

"Most private-sector companies don't know how to run a hospital with intensive care, maternity and emergency services in particular. The experience in Britain is that when you have an emergency in a private sector hospital it is transferred to the NHS."

The health authority's director of strategy Stephen Dunn insisted "staff and assets will remain in the NHS," describing worries about privatisation as "unfounded."

A private operator would run the hospital under NHS budgets and NHS terms and conditions and would face "robust monitoring from the health authority to ensure standards are maintained," he said.

A warning bell on the hospital was sounded in February 2007 in an eye-opening Unison Eastern Region report Caught in the Crossfire: The Plight of Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust by Health Emergency information director John Lister.

In it he labelled Hinchingbrooke a classic example of a trust that had found itself "caught in the crossfire" of government reforms creating a new marketised NHS.

Broken promises from Cambridgeshire PCT to refer patients to Hinchingbrooke's "£22 million" treatment centre, which was funded through the private finance initiative at an eventual cost of £93 million, left the hospital with an underused facility and a long-term bill.

Professor Allyson Pollock of the University of Edinburgh added that privatisation had been the very reason behind deficits in the first place.

"Private contracts, capital charges and abortive PFI deals are often behind a hospital's deficit," she said.

"This isn't the first nail in the coffin, it's the last."