Government confirms NHS ‘free’
pharmafile | May 10, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Hunt, NHS, avaaz
The government has reaffirmed that NHS treatment “will remain free at the point of delivery and available according to clinical need”.
It felt the need to respond to the Avaaz.org campaign, an online movement designed to put pressure on political decision-makers across a number of global causes.
Avaaz launched its ‘NHS: emergency operation’ campaign after the government climbed down on the wording of the Health and Social Care Act around commissioning in March.
Health minister Norman Lamb told MPs then that part of the Act would be rewritten to avoid ‘misinterpretation’, after GPs and royal colleges put pressure on the government to change the way section 75 of the controversial Act had been drafted.
Introduced in February, the disputed lines in the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) Regulations said commissioners can only award a contract without competition if they are “satisfied that the services to which the contract relates are capable of being provided only by that provider”.
National Voices, a coalition of 130 health and social care charities, said the regulations as they stood would have had “the effect of enforcing an NHS commissioning system based almost exclusively on competition”.
Critics argued that the wording meant that most NHS services would be open to competition from private companies – a sea-change that ministers had gone out of their way to deny as the controversial Act made its way through Parliament.
Avaaz had written: “Opening all NHS contracts to private companies could pave the way for asset-stripping of our health facilities.”
Calling on health secretary Jeremy Hunt to make sure that the guidelines would be changed to make this impossible, the campaign went on: “Let’s hold his feet to the fire to ensure that doctors – not giant corporations – decide patients care.”
In its new statement, the government said independent, voluntary and private organisations have always been part of NHS services: “For example, most GPs are private contractors, and the medicines the NHS buys are manufactured by private companies.”
But it said that it remained true to the founding principle of the NHS that treatment should be free at the point of delivery and that its new regulations “clearly state that there is no requirement to put all contracts out to competitive tender”.
Healthcare regulator Monitor has no power to force the competitive tendering of services, the government went on, which means any decision “about how and when to introduce competition is solely up to the doctors and nurses in clinical commissioning groups”.
It concluded: “Also, competition should not override integration, which commissioners should use where it is in the interests of patients.”
Adam Hill
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