Allyson Pollock and Sylvia Godden of Edinburgh university’s centre for public health policy said: “There is no good evidence that independent sector treatment centres [ISTCs] have provided additional capacity, value for money or high-quality care,” while they are leading to “fragmentation and financial instability” in the NHS.

Prof Pollock, a critic of private sector involvement in the NHS, said that with the centres running below capacity, and with the Healthcare Commission saying there is inadequate data fully to compare the ISTCs’ performance with the rest of the NHS, “the available evidence suggests that the private sector is profiting at the expense of patients, the public and the NHS”.

Prof Pollock’s criticism in the British Medical Journal comes ahead of a government decision next month on whether to grant seven new contracts to add to the existing 25 centres.

The Department of Health rejected her view saying: “The independent sector has undoubtedly helped improve services for patients, speeding up treatment and reducing waiting times.” The centres had also “galvanised the NHS to raise its game”.

The first centres were set up to treat about 170,000 patients a year, with contracts awarded worth about £1.5bn over five years. The NHS committed itself to pay about 11 per cent on average above the standard NHS price for treatments. As of last September, the centres had an average occupancy of about 84 per cent.

Prof Pollock said the original assurance that the centres would use non-NHS staff had not been honoured, with about a quarter of staff being seconded from the NHS. The centres took work from NHS hospitals and “NHS beds and services are being closed to make way for the for-profit private sector,” she claimed.

The NHS Partners Network, the trade association for the treatment centre providers, said that the claims ignored “incontrovertible evidence” that patients rated the treatment they received from ISTCs very highly, with satisfaction rates of 96 per cent.

“They also miss the fundamental point of this programme, which is to use competition as a mechanism for driving efficiency improvements in the wider NHS, while giving patients some real choice”.

The health department remained “committed to a diversity of providers in healthcare” with more data on quality due to be published.

The remaining schemes would only go ahead where they met local needs, offered value for money and benefited NHS patients, a spokesman said.

From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3570ce14-e19e-11dc-a302-0000779fd2ac.html