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Dr Richard Smith |
Fury at ‘NHS fears profit’ diagnosis
Hospital board members challenge US firm chief as ‘those people at the gates’ protest
BOARD members at Whittington Hospital clashed with the former editor of the British Medical Journal this week over the future of the NHS.
Dr Richard Smith – now a director with the influential US firm United Health Group – made “the case for profit” at the Archway hospital’s annual health oration on Tuesday, the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service.
About 30 campaigners from the Keep Our NHS Public group demonstrated outside the hospital. During his talk, Dr Smith repeatedly referred to “those people at the gates” and to a cultural “fear of profit” that had left the NHS stagnating.
He said: “I have spoken to people like those at the gate before and they have told me they would prefer the private sector was not involved in the NHS even if it meant services did not improve – I just cannot understand that.”
“It is important to look at the fears of the people at the gate. What are they scared about? It is something particular to the British. We are against profit, even though the vast majority of our products come from companies and it is hard to find a better way of improving quality than profit.”
He added: “I blame the Romantic poets. They said they wanted hills, not factories. In this country the perception is that profit is made through fiddling or deception. You imagine the plutocrat sitting in his yacht. That isn’t the case. The way to make profit is to meet people’s needs – the minute you don’t you are out.
“If you are saying an antipathy to profit is part of British culture – well, I think you might want to rethink that. What does it matter if the surplus goes into the Whittington mess fund or into the New York stock exchange?”
But Whittington non-executive director Maria Duggan said Dr Smith had failed to understand that the not-for-profit principle of the NHS was “part of the DNA” of British culture.
Ms Duggan, a leading health policy expert, added: “Importing other systems from other countries is not always the solution. We have a set of values, customs, culture – our zeitgeist – that we have all grown up with. If, here at the Whittington, we make a profit it becomes a question of how we spend that surplus. The issue is where that profit is going. The principles of the NHS are part of our culture and history – that is what is motivating the people at the gate.”
Despite a public outcry, UnitedHealth UK now runs three GP surgeries in neighbouring Camden. Dr Smith left the company’s British arm just months before the contracts were signed but works as executive director of Ovations, another subsidiary of the United Health Group.
Dr Smith claimed the public and private sector could work together, as long as government “held the whip hand”. He said: “We will go on spending more and more on health care. What I wonder is how long that expansion can go on being funded by taxation?”
He would like Britain to have hospitals such as one in Valencia, Spain, built through a public-private partnership, which had cut costs while providing a better service. But Whittington chief executive David Sloman said: “We have been visited by doctors from that hospital and they say it has all gone wrong and it isn’t affordable any more. When there is a question of affordability, where the profits are going becomes an issue.” |
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