On the critical list: privatisation has triggered a major increase in NHS patient deaths because the services provided by private firms are of a significantly lower quality, according to a study published in The Lancet.

The oldest medical journal on the planet has published a report showing the NHS outsourcing – also known as privatisation – has caused a significant increase in patient deaths.

This is due to healthcare services being of lower quality since private firms were allowed to provide them.

The study states:

The privatisation of the NHS in England, through the outsourcing of services to for-profit companies, consistently increased in 2013–20. Private sector outsourcing corresponded with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality, potentially as a result of a decline in the quality of health-care services.

We found that an annual increase of one percentage point of outsourcing to the private for-profit sector corresponded with an annual increase in treatable mortality of 0·38% deaths per 100 000 population in the following year… Changes to for-profit outsourcing since 2014 were associated with an additional 557 treatable deaths across the 173 CCGs.

It elaborates:

We found significant increases in for-profit outsourcing between 2013 and 2020.

Since 2013, the annual numbers of treatable deaths in England has increased, breaking the trend of decreasing mortality for the previous 10 years.

We found significant positive associations: an additional £1 million spent on for-profit companies corresponded with average increases of 0·29 deaths for all CCGs in the following year.

Between 2014 and 2019, there were total yearly increases of £927 million spent on for-profit providers by all 173 CCGs included in this study sample. Based on the changes in for-profit spending and observed changes in treatable deaths for each CCG, we calculated that 557 additional deaths could have been attributed to changes in private-sector outsourcing between 2014 and 2019 across the 173 CCGs in the years for which we had data.

So, because of NHS privatisation, 557 people lost their lives, who should have been alive today.

And that’s before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK.

Strangely, there hasn’t been a whisper about this in the mainstream media. Did you see it on the TV news? It’s almost as if there’s been a blackout.

Source: Outsourcing health-care services to the private sector and treatable mortality rates in England, 2013–20: an observational study of NHS privatisation – The Lancet Public Health

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