What's Happening in Wandsworth Primary Care Trust ?

During 2008 Wandsworth Primary Care Trust(Now NHS Wandsworth) conducted a survey of what patients wanted for health services in Battersea and North Wandsworth. It was the usual tick box exercise with the minimum of information and no real opportunity for patients to either question the proposals, or even to put forward any of their own.

The outcome, predictably, was that the PCT could boast that it had consulted widely and that everyone was in complete agreement with its proposals.

The lynchpin of the PCT’s plans for Battersea is a new polyclinic to be built, preferably, in the Clapham Junction area. No costings were given for such a project and before you could say ‘privatisation’ the PCT had an ‘information day’ for possible tenders. No-one knows as yet who has been awarded the contract, but we do know that the new Vice President of the Patients Association Sir Richard Branson (no conflict of interest there) is very keen that his company Virgin should move into health care. Could the tax payers of Battersea be the lucky recipients of Branson’s bid, or could it be the US based United Healthcare- who have already scooped up GP surgeries in Camden, and could be looking to expand South of the river.

Despite requests under the Freedom of Information Act, Wandsworth PCT has refused to divulge just how much the new project will cost. What we do know, and here alarm bells should ring, is that the new polyclinic will be built under a Local Improvement Finance Trust scheme. This lovely little earner for the private sector entails a consortium of private companies getting together and building the new premises, and then leasing it back to NHS over the period of the contract, usually up to thirty years.

We have an example of a LIFT contract with the St John’s Therapy Centre on St John’s Hill. The Centre was built by a consortium called ‘Building Better Health’, and then leased back to the NHS over a twenty five year period. The Centre cost seven million pounds to build but is being leased back by the PCT at £945,000 a year-this is linked to the retail price index, which is currently 2.5% a year. With LIFT schemes, like their PFI counterparts, it is difficult to make final estimates of the cost- in the case of St John’s Therapy Centre it is likely to be about £32million. An example of the NHS paying a private consortium almost five times more than it would have cost to build the premises itself. Of course, included in the price is the cost of the building’s maintenance-hardly onerous.

At the same time patients in the Battersea area who need to will now visit St John’s, rather than their dearly loved Bolingbroke Hospital, which the Trust Board of St George’s has just declared, ‘surplus to requirements’.

Hopefully, Wandsworth PCT will intervene and make full use of this valuable NHS site.

The old Battersea Borough Council ,before its abolition in 1964, had as its motto-‘not for you, not for me, but for us’. This worthy principle is enshrined in the National Health Service, which celebrated its sixtieth anniversary last year. The idea that we have collective ownership of our health provision is something that the Borough Council would have approved. However, there are others that do not see it that way.

Since the nineties there has been an increasing drive to privatise our health care, embedded in new legislation and policy The dogma, that private necessarily means better, has however taken a severe beating over the past few months. Taxpayers have had to bail out the private sector to the tune of billions of pounds.

Hopefully, the lessons of the recent period will not be lost on those in high places, or our local NHS bodies, and the creeping privatisation of our health services will come to a stop.

Wandsworth Primary Care Trust though may need some convincing of the errors of trying to privatise health care. The Trust Board, that runs primary health care in the Borough is an unlikely mixture of full time directors, and paid non executive directors and a Chair, who are appointed by an appointments commission of the Department of Health. Under this arrangement ,soon to be abolished in other parts of the United Kingdom, neither patients, or the public, or staff members of Wandsworth PCT have any representation, and surprisingly neither is there any local authority voice on the Board. We may pay through our taxes for our health service, but unlike our council or our MP we have no say whatsoever in how our local health service is administered and governed.

According to Wandsworth PCT’s website, the Trust Chair has a background in, ‘sales and marketing’ and is also the chair of a plc, and on the board of another company.. One of the five non executive directors is a senior consultant for a number of venture capital companies, while another held senior executive positions at Lloyds’ of London, and a third is a fellow of the Institute of Directors. Non executive directors are suppose to be, amongst other things, representative of the local community. Hardly the case in Wandsworth.

As we move into 2009 the NHS is at a crossroads. Will it remain under democratic ownership and control or will it be privatised and broken up. The omens are not good, either here in Wandsworth or nationally. The midnight hour for those living in Battersea will come at the end of March when they will know just who has gained the contract for the new Clapham Junction Health Centre. Will it be a private company, or will it be a group of NHS doctors ? Watch this space.