Dispatches goes inside Richard Branson’s £750m health empire

Mirrored fromthebureauinvestigates.com

Labour started the farming-out of NHS care to private contractors – but under the Coalition the process has taken a quantum leap, as the Health and Social Care Act opened up all sorts of areas to profit-making businesses. Last night’s Dispatches raised serious concerns about what happens when patient care and profits collide.

Last year the Bureau explored the boom in for-profit medical services and revealed significant risks, including showing that one in seven doctors in the new GP-led consortia could have significant financial conflicts of interest as a result of the changes.

In Getting Rich on the NHS, Dispatches focused on Virgin Care, Richard Branson’s medical behemoth, which has already won £750m of NHS contracts. It provides specialist services, such as dermatology or retinal scanning, and in many areas has taken over running GP practices in partnership with doctors.

Related stories: NHS reforms examined

But Dispatches reveals a litany of complaints about how some of the Virgin-led practices are being run: despite promises that opening hours would expand and care would improve, the number of full-time staff has fallen and opening hours have shrunk, making it ever harder to get appointments, the programme claims.

In some cases there’s an increasing reliance on locum doctors, Dispatches alleges, which medical experts say leads to disjointed care and a lack of understanding of the complexities of some individuals’ cases. And patients explain how they feel their care has suffered.

It’s all very disturbing, but opening hours and staffing issues are not the stuff of gripping TV, and at times the efforts of Dispatches to inject drama threaten to lurch the programme into Brasseye-style parody. At one point a beardy local is recruited to spy on his Virgin-run surgery to check its opening hours: he diligently lurks in the Northampton car park, capturing grainy cameraphone footage of staff getting into their cars while recording the exact time in a conspiratorial whisper.

And we are constantly shown footage of Richard Branson being his usual bombastic self: publicising his space missions, airlines and so on. To put it bluntly, he’s not the most sinister of telly villains.

Unintentional comedy aside, the documentary hints at genuine skulduggery: in a scramble to meet chlamydia-testing targets, one surgery run by Assura, which has since rebranded as Virgin Care resorted to sending staff to test their family and friends, in what may have led to some interesting breakfast-table conversations – Virgin is keen to underline that this was stopped as soon as it came to light.

While in Merseyside, as Private Eye has previously reported, concerns were raised that a Virgin locum dermatologist wasn’t on the specialist register – although Virgin insists ‘all clinicians across all of its services are appropriately qualified to provide services as per commissioners’ specifications’.

Virgin has issued a statement refuting many of Dispatches’ claims and saying the portrayal of its services by Dispatches was ‘deliberately misleading and defamatory’. It adds that ‘many of the services taken on by Virgin Care and its partners were significantly under performing when they were taken on’ and have improved under Virgin.

According to popular folklore, the NHS is Britain’s most cherished institution, and as with the other grande dame of British society, the BBC, it would be career suicide for any politician to tamper with it. This may be part of the reason David Cameron specifically promised no top-down reorganisation of the NHS in his manifesto.

It’s likely that most people don’t really care whether they are treated by the NHS or by private companies – as long as their care is good, prompt, and free to use. And the increasingly precarious state of many NHS trusts – revealed in a parliamentary report today – is an indication of the massive challenges facing the current system.

But as Dispatches demonstrates, injecting a profit motive into the system isn’t guaranteed to be the cure the system needs.

Watch Getting Rich on the NHS