Care home syndrome

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.