Speaking as a private NHS IT contractor. This worries me :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32088860
When most people talk about privatisation of the NHS, they think of private companies taking over patient care, using cheap staff without training to milk the NHS dry.
Our contract however is completely different. The Labour government under Tony blair has already tried to put us out of business. The labour government spent £10 billion trying to create an IT system to replace the one we provide as part of our contract. However, the whole thing was a failure and cost the tax payer a fortune.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn
Our contracts provide the NHS with a system that the NHS can't provide by itself. They've tried that, and failed miserably.
Personally I'd always been in two minds about my role. On the one hand I can see that we are effectively making a profit from public money that could be spent on front line healthcare, but on the other hand, we work 1st hand with the non clinical staff in the trusts and commissioning groups, and we can see the vast amounts of money that gets wasted, buying things at the end of the year that they don't need just to ensure they keep their budget next year. We see the waste in the way that they buy things whereby nothing is priced up but instead they say how much they have to spend and the seller gives them something for that amount.
The thing is as well, is that the financial terms in our contracts aren't decided by us. We had to sign up to a national framework with the Health And Social Care Information Centre. The NHS laid out how much we would get paid by customer, how much we would be fined for not meeting our service levels, and the exact requirements for what those service levels were. We had very little input in the whole thing with the NHS telling us we could either sign up to their contract, or get lost as the contract was the same for suppliers in the framework.
We played by the NHS's rules, and we sit and watch our colleagues in the public sector get paid vastly inflated wages when compared with ours, so much so that plenty of our colleagues left and jumped the fence purely to go chasing the better wages.
So why then, given all of the above, is our profit reason for labour to declare War on the private sector contractors ?
