HSJ Live: rolling news 20.11.12
5:03pm In these times of efficiency savings and budget cuts, King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust has come up with an innovative way of diversifying its income without compromising on patient care.
Commercial partnerships will help generate more revenue streams, the surplus from which could be reinvested into the trust. Tim Smart explains.
2:15 HSJ Editor Alastair McLellan asks: ‘Will we remember November 2012 as the month health policy – after two decades travelling in one direction – began to forge a different path?’ Norman Lamb’s support for integrated care ‘experiments’ may mark an important turning point.
12.15pm The DH’s Bob Ricketts signals that CCGs should start thinking about ‘prime contractor’ deals for 2014-15. These basically give a budget for a condition or population to one provider and lets them commission the rest, CCGs can then commission for outcomes.
10.40am This week’s HSJ Local Briefing looks at the state of the London FT pipeline and reveals the bidders to take-over one of the capital’s district general hospital trusts.
10.24am New research has revealed that some hospitals are paying hundreds of pounds more than others for certain standard medical supplies. Ernst and Young and NHS product comparison website Peto obtained data from 10 trusts, showing a gulf in the amounts being paid for items like warming blankets, forceps, stents and other surgical implements.
10.21am The lives of lung cancer patients are being put at risk by a shortage of specialists and outdated views on possible outcomes, a report by the UK Lung Cancer Coalition warns. There are just 70 specialist thoracic surgeons serving 200-plus multidisciplinary lung cancer teams nationwide.
09.42am: Good morning, on HSJ today we have a report on sustainable GP leadership for commissioning. Research identified a financial impact to practices in releasing often the most senior GP to CCG commissioning. We’ll be having a LinkedIn discussion on this 27 November.
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John Johnson | 20-Nov-2012 12:18 pm
The Zombie Care scandal
The biggest scandal in NHS purchasing is not the cost of supplies. It is NHS commissioners outsourcing care to highly-endebted "zombie companies" in the private sector, being used to house some of the most vulnerable NHS patients. Particularly in areas like learning disability and mental health, the NHS is spending £100s of millions of which a large portion is going not on care but on servicing unsustainable debt. These companies are forced by the banks and private equity to cut care expenditure and investment in services to make interest payments.
Although Montoring is aware of these risks, it has retreated from its naive and unworkable risk pooling proposals and appears to be concentrating on relatively trivial shortfalls in NHS FTs. Meanwhile the CQC is picking up piecemeal examples of care failures in these specific private sector providers. No one seems to see that we are heading for more tragedies with features of Winterbourne View and Southern Cross. It is time for urgent action - putting these companies into administration and protecting patients rather than banks, before the next avoidable disaster happens.
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