How come we didn't know?
Privatisation: the corporate take-over of our NHS.
Photographic exhibition by Marion Macalpine, sponsored by Hackney Keep Our NHS Public
This photographic exhibition has been touring the country since 2014, and has recently been updated.
It is available for groups to borrow to help with their campaigning. It shows the many different faces of NHS privatisation, as well as the consequences and risks of privatisation.
It has been very successful in getting information to people who know little about NHS privatisation; and in enabling campaigning groups to build new memberships. These are some comments from viewers:
- A thought-provoking exhibition with powerful visual images complementing the facts. Reveals some highly scary and worrying trends.
- Excellent exhibition -the use of photographs makes the issues raised come to life.
- The exhibition has been a considerable success, a re-focusing of the work in Deal. We're very grateful for its existence.
Virgin Care HQ Tavistock Square WC1
Virgin Care have won NHS contracts valued at £2.5 billion since 2010, including over £1 billion in the year to December 2017.
In 2012, Virgin Care won a £100m-a-year deal to run NHS community services in Surrey. In January 2014, a Care Quality Commission evaluation of a Virgin Care-owned clinic in Croydon found it put patients at risk and was in breach of four basic standards of care. In 2016 Virgin sued the NHS when it failed to win an £82 million 3-year contract for children’s community care in Surrey. The case was settled in 2017 with secret payments to Virgin estimated at over £2 million. In 2017, Virgin Care ran over 400 NHS services,but since 2010 the company has recorded an annual loss in the UK. As Virgin Care Ltd claims it makes no profit in the UK, the company pays no tax in the UK. However, Virgin Care’s ultimate parent company is Virgin Group Holdings Ltd registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
St Leonard’s Hospital, Nuttall Street, London N 1: a community hospital that is at risk of sell-off under new ‘Transformation’ plans
Since 2016 the NHS in England has been completely reorganised into 44 new Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships, covering every area of England. There was no public debate, no new legislation, no parliamentary scrutiny, no consultation with either NHS professional bodies or local communities – just an unannounced Government-led total restructure of the NHS. In many areas local authorities are involved and social care is also included.
The new Partnerships restore the ability to plan and deliver locally-based and integrated care (abolished by previous Government action), and this aspect is welcome. But it comes at a devastating price: these Partnerships are required to cut the NHS budget by around a fifth (£22 billion) by 2020 compared with 2015 costs.
These savage cuts will be made through ‘new models of care’. These involve reducing A&E services; closing beds and hospitals; selling off ‘surplus’ NHS property, such as this building which is currently used for community health services; replacing qualified doctors with 2-year-trained ‘Physician Associates’; replacing other NHS professional staff with unqualified care assistants; replacing professional care with care at home by family carers (overwhelmingly women), IT gadgets and Skype.
At the same time, the newly restructured services will be ripe for privatisation. New Integrated Care Organisations, which bring together several existing services, will be very attractive to giant US healthcare corporations, risking, ultimately, wholesale sell-off of the NHS
