Care home syndrome

11 June 2011

Beware of privatisations that still leave bureaucrats calling the shots

It is, as David Cameron says, a time to pause, listen and reflect: reflect that for every granny starving and dehydrating on an NHS ward there is quite possibly a patient in a private hospital being pulled screaming into a cold shower. If it wasn’t already obvious that private provision is no panacea for public services, it should be to anyone who watched last week’s Panorama film about Winterbourne View, a care home for people with learning disabilities run by Teesdale-based Castlebeck Care. For £3,500 a week, taxpayers have been funding a regime every bit as horrible as the state-run institutions which private care homes have largely replaced. Covert filming shows residents being habitually hit, pulled along the floor, pinned down under a chair for long periods and in one case goaded by a tattooed thug into repeating a suicide attempt.

There is no graphic footage of maltreatment in Southern Cross’s care homes, but in their own way they, too, have provided a poor advertisement for privately provided healthcare. Built on the hugely profitable business of selling care places to councils, the company turns out to have been constructed as an engine of wealth-creation for the asset-strippers who formerly owned it and pawned its freeholds. Now that it can no longer afford the rent on the homes it once owned, the taxpayer is likely to end up bailing it out.

If I were Andrew Lansley I would be tempted to send out my minions in search of NHS scandals on the scale of that of Stafford Hospital — and quick, before poor standards in private care homes becomes the overwhelming story. He isn’t going to succeed in selling NHS reforms based on greater private provision if the public conceive that the only achievement of private provision in public healthcare is to provide the patients with a better quality of carpet to be dragged along.

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