NHS hospital contract 'not back-door privatisation'

The only NHS bidder to run debt-burdened Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon – the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust – withdrew earlier this week, leaving five private health providers in the running.

When the contract is awarded by the East of England health authority, Hinchingbrooke will become the first NHS hospital of its type in Britain to be operated by a private firm.

One of the bidders interested in operating Hinchingbrooke is the Circle healthcare partnership, which is owned and run by the clinicians who provide front-line care. Circle already runs NHS treatment centres in Eccleshill near Bradford, Burton-upon-Trent and Nottingham and is opening a hospital in Bath. A health union yesterday claimed the Huntingdon hospital was being used in a "dangerous experiment", warning that the remaining bidders have no experience of running accident and emergency departments.

But the health authority's director of strategy Stephen Dunn said that all the companies in the race had provided elective surgery, such as knee and hip replacements, to NHS patients in treatment centres, and one had enlisted neighbouring Peterborough and Stamford NHS Trust as a clinical partner.

Dr Dunn said: "The NHS remains firmly part of this process. Staff and assets will remain in the NHS. They are not being sold. This is not about selling the family silver. This is not about privatisation. These worries are just unfounded."

A private operator would run the hospital under NHS budgets and NHS terms and conditions and would face "robust" monitoring to ensure standards are maintained, he said. "We will not tolerate any poor performance or any failure to deliver on quality standards."

But Karen Jennings, health spokeswoman for union Unison, said: "Hinchingbrooke is actually under new management and starting to make progress, so it's a real waste of public money to go through this process of market testing.

"Most private sector companies don't know how to run a hospital with intensive care, maternity and emergency services in particular.

"The experience in the UK is that when you have an emergency in a private sector hospital it is transferred to the NHS. This is a dangerous experiment...it is a crying shame that we have got a situation now where the door may be open to more private sector companies coming in."