Serco gain sole control of NHS Hospital for the first time in a £160m deal

From: http://www.labourleft.co.uk/serco-gain-sole-control-of-nhs-hospital-for-the-first-time-in-a-160m-deal/

July 21, 2012

By Dr Eoin Clarke (PhD)

Nearly £4,500,000,000 of the NHS has been put out to tender since January 2012, as the scale of private sector involvement in our NHS grows. In just the last 3 weeks nearly £2.5bn has been put out to private tender. For example, last week Virgin secured the £44m contract to gain control of children’s services in NHS Devon. Over a 5 year period, this contract if extended would be worth £220m (minimum). In addition, new contracts recently tendered include:

Hillingdon MSK £200m

Surrey Downs Community Services £125m

Pathology E & W Midlands £550m

Nottingham Treatment Centre £42m

Community Health in Gloucs. £500m

Patient Transport Bournemouth £19m

NW Personal Social Care Services £300m

But today, the most sinister of all developments emerged when Serco signed their first contract to gain sole control of an entire NHS Hospital. Suffolk NHS have handed over a £160m contract to Serco to run Newmarket Hospital. As of midnight it is no longer an NHS Hospital and is now privately run (see here for more).

If you wish to see a spreadsheet of every other NHS service put out to private tender then you can view the spreadsheet I have put together from this link (here). Two more hospitals are facing privatisation (George Eliot and St Hellier) and when I know more about their future, I will post the details here. If the scale of privatisations continued at this pace, we could be facing close to £30,000,000,000 more of privatisations before the next General Election.