'Enormous' number of privatised NHS services across the UK, mapped: 'This is bad for everyone'

A new map has exposed the “enormous number” of NHS services that have been privatised across the UK.

Each of the 2,495 pins on this UK map – released by Medic-led campaign group EveryDoctor – represents an outsourced healthcare service run by an external provider.

“Funnelling money into private companies” compromises healthcare, warned the group’s chief executive Dr Julia Patterson.

“NHS privatisation introduces a profit motive into the delivery of healthcare, and that’s bad for everyone apart from company shareholders,” she said. “If we want to rebuild the NHS, politicians need to support NHS staff properly to deliver excellent care to patients.”

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The London School of Economics has estimated that there are 53,000 private contracts within the NHS, worth around £29bn a year. These constitute about a fifth of the entire health service budget.

Why is the NHS in crisis?

After years of Tory underfunding, the NHS is in crisis. Around 7.61 million people are on elective waiting lists in England alone, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that lengthy A&E waits killed around 300 people per week in 2023. An eye-watering 1.5 million patients in England waited 12 hours or more after arriving at A&E over the past year.

Earlier this month, Labour shadow health secretary Wes Streeting reiterated his plans to introduce more widespread use of private resources in the NHS if Labour form the next government.

“Pouring more money in without reform would be like pouring water into a leaky bucket,” he wrote in the Sun.

But a growing body of research suggests that privatisation leads to adverse health outcomes.

A 2022 University of Oxford study linked privatisation to avoidable patient deaths, warning that outsourcing between 2013 and 2020 corresponded “with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality, potentially as a result of a decline in the quality of health-care services”.

Last month, the Lancet Medical journal conducted a global study of privatisation, concluding “at the very least, healthcare privatisation has almost never had a positive effect on the quality of care”.

But despite consistent adverse findings, UK health privatisation has been steadily increasing since 2012. The 2012 Health and Social Care act made it much easier for private companies to acquire NHS contracts, raising the maximum share of their income NHS foundation trusts can raise from private patients from an average of 2% to 49%.

In 2011, just 3% of NHS patients were treated by private companies. In 2022, this had jumped to 10%.

Earlier this month, Streeting’s comments sparked an impassioned backlash from anti-privatisation campaigners.

“Increasing outsourcing to private healthcare providers is not the answer. The solution is funding the NHS properly and investing so that it can develop its own capacity,” Johnbosco Nwogbo, lead health campaigner at We Own It, told the Big Issue.