Back in the scary but innocent days of March 2020 the Government and NHS sought to maximise hospital capacity. This was surely the right thing to do, given the uncertainty of the pandemic, but many of its efforts backfired badly.
First, NHS Hospitals decanted bed-blockers without testing them for SARS-CoV-2. Some were infected, igniting lethal nursing-home outbreaks. Secondly, the Government commissioned Nightingale Hospitals to great fanfare. Unfortunately, as it should have perceived beforehand and soon discovered, there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to staff these facilities. The Nightingales quietly closed over the subsequent months, having treated derisory numbers of patients. Some treated no one at all. Half a billion of taxpayers’ money went pop. Third, the Government spent £2 billion to buy-up capacity at private hospitals, which did have staff, beds and expertise. The BMJ, whose article is worth reading in full, has managed – after multiple FOI requests – to analyse how this turned out, and it isn’t pretty.
In the BMJ’s words:
The major deal bought the entire capacity of 200 private hospitals, including 8,000 private beds, 1,200 ventilators, 700 doctors and 10,000 nurses, to help the NHS care for patients with COVID-19, with cancer, or needing urgent operations…
The national contract block booked beds, equipment, and staff… It allowed NHS teams to take over whole departments of private hospitals if necessary. NHS England agreed to pay for the bulk of the hospitals’ operating costs, including staff, consumables, rent, capital expenditure, building modifications and infrastructure.
According to the BMJ, the March 2020 plan was for this extra capacity to be used for Covid patients, but this changed in May 2020, with the independent sector told to concentrate upon elective patients whose surgery had been delayed whilst the NHS concentrated upon Covid. I believe that this was true of provincial England but that, from the start, the London plan was that the NHS would handle Covid whilst contracted private sites remained ‘Covid clear’ and undertook medical and surgical treatments that would otherwise be delayed.
When contracted beds were not needed by the NHS, the private hospitals remained free to admit paying patients, but with 60-85% of the income remitted to the Government. Readers should note, as an aside, that the Government effectively closed the posher London private hospitals to their Middle Eastern patient clientele owing to travel restrictions. This should have left the hospitals with substantial spare capacity and an urgent need for new income streams.
The NHS made little use of this pre-paid capacity for Covid. Through the March and April 2020 peak only 0.62% of the 8,000 contracted beds were used to treat Covid patients. On April 12th 2020, at the peak of the first wave, the NHS had almost 19,000 Covid inpatients, 2,881 on mechanical ventilation, whereas the contracted private sector had 52. Just 30 of the 200 contracted sites ever treated COVID-19 patients and one of these – the royalty-favoured King Edward VII – treated one Covid patient for one day, which sounds like an incidental case to me.
Low numbers are understandable if sites were told to concentrate on non-Covid care and, at least from May 2020, this was their core role. But there is one key point that the BMJ misses: few of the contracted sites can have had Covid outbreaks during the first wave. That contrasts with care homes and NHS hospitals, implying exemplary infection control, a view that tallies with my experience when I ran Public Health England’s reference lab for antibiotic resistance.
High-end London private hospitals regularly sent exotically antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the lab, seeking advice on treatment and a view on mechanisms of resistance. These bacteria largely came from Middle Eastern patients who’d previously been hospitalised in Saudi or the Gulf Region, some approached pan-resistance, and we’d scrabble to identify some obscure or developmental antibiotic that might be used. Crucially, though, I never once saw such a superbug cause an outbreak at a private hospital, whereas I saw and advised upon plenty of superbug outbreaks at NHS sites.
What’s more concerning than the paucity of Covid patients is how few non-Covid NHS patients were treated at the contracted hospitals. This was particularly striking for prestigious London sites. The 234-bed London Clinic provided just 896 NHS in-patient, outpatient and day case activities over six months for £28.2m received. That’s £30,000 per activity, which seems steep, given that not all ‘activities’ required the patient to be admitted. Numbers were similar for the BUPA Cromwell.
Underuse was general, though, and not confined to these high-end London sites, as revealed by how much private work the contracted sites could continue to perform. Across 29 contracted Nuffield Hospitals 64% of episodes of inpatient care during the first year of the pandemic were for private patients, not for the NHS cases for whom beds were reserved. At 36 contracted Spire hospitals the proportion was 62%, at Circle’s 47 hospitals it was 44% and at Ramsay’s 31 sites it was 27%. Together, these four groups accounted for 75% of the £2bn contract.
There is no suggestion by the BMJ (or me) that any site or hospital group wilfully avoided admitting NHS patients and instead prioritised paying patients. Rather, NHS patients weren’t being referred, leaving independent hospitals free to take those with insurance or who’d grown so frustrated with ‘our NHS’ that they chose to self-refer and to settle their own accounts.
This underuse matters because, as the OECD reports, and the BMJ fails to stress, the U.K. was among the worst European countries at providing non-Covid medicine. During 2020 the U.K. saw a greater reduction in the provision of major cancer surgery than in any other European country bar Romania.
It was similarly bad for hip and knee replacements, and for cataracts.
The BMJ finds a few medics to justify aspects of the underuse, asserting that private sites weren’t suitable for Covid patients, or that one particular hospital ordinarily handled sports injuries and wasn’t always appropriate for complex orthopaedic patients managed at the NHS teaching hospital with which it was partnered. At one tiny 12-bed private hospital in Oxfordshire surgeons operating on an NHS patient were allegedly told to ‘hurry up’ because there was a private patient waiting.
It is right to point out these deficiencies, but they cannot account for massive underuse when, demonstrably, there were patients who needed treatment and weren’t receiving it.
High-end London private hospitals are well able to provide major cancer surgery. They do so for overseas patients in normal times. Joint replacements and cataract surgery are the bread and butter work for contracted provincial hospitals owned by Spire, Nuffield, Circle and Ramsay.
Some people will have died because they failed to receive cancer surgery. Many more will have suffered pain, immobility and poor vision owing to delayed elective procedures. The latter folk are now part of the NHS backlog, patiently awaiting their turn in ‘our NHS’, or shelling out from their own pockets for private surgery.
It needn’t have been like this. Hospitals were waiting and bills had been pre-paid. It is scandal that this capacity was not used. Allyson Pollack, Professor of Public Health at Newcastle University, told the BMJ that the Parliamentary Accounts Committee or National Audit Office should investigate. I concur, and hope that they interview Dr. Richard Packard, chair of the Federation of Independent Practitioner Organisations, who told the BMJ, “It was the NHS managers who were supposed to organise things,” adding that, “The NHS couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.”
Many frontline NHS healthcare staff worked with great dedication through the worst months of the pandemic. They deserve respect, whatever one thinks of lockdowns, masks, vaccines et cetera. The same cannot be said of ‘our NHS’ as an organisation.
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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Yawn.
Is James Delingpole really a young earth creationist? I know he is nuts but surely not so blatantly nuts?
Not that nuts no. He doesn’t believe in the religion of Darwin and shit happens – a sure sign of mental deficiency.
It is one thing not to believe in evolution but young earth? That requires some pretty dramatic denial of basic science.
My opinion is that he is actually pig-shit thick and has only risen to his level of mediocrity through neoptism.
I’ve never seen convincing explanations of why it should matter to the British people which towns they’ve never heard of are ruled from Kiev and which from Moscow, or why the USA and its lackey states are so desperate for a Ukrainian victory.
You could have said much the same about Poland in 1939 except you substitute Warsaw and Berlin.
It could but it would be a grossly unbalanced response.
Exactly. And we went to war to stop Poland being ruled by an evil dictator in a totalitarian regime, and after 5 years of blood, guts, destruction, death, and bankruptcy we won the war so that Poland could be ruled by an evil dictator in a totalitarian regime.
Are you saying we should not have intervened in 1939?
…because it has nothing to do with Ukraine in reality..that’s why they’ll let every Ukrainian die without a second thought…as they are doing…Ukraine is just the ‘fist’ they use to try to punch Russia…
It’s mainly about the economic rise of the actual majority of the world’s population, and the countries they inhabit…China India Brazil..the Global south… and the fact that the, by far, biggest resource rich country, Russia, is the ‘engine’ that will power them…
This article..which personally I think shows just how mis-guided the US is about Russia, does explain your ‘why’…..but as Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without NATO assistance..I suppose it depends on how crazy the USA are, and how far they are willing to go to achieve their aims…I don’t think they care if Europe is wrecked in the process either…
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/treacherous-path-better-russia
“Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without NATO assistance”?? I think you’ll find that Russia is doing a good job of defeating NATO and killing off the EU. All for having to stop NATO naked expansionism. Oh well, the West wasn’t invited to the 130-country St Petersburg Economic Conference this week. It’s about time the oligarchs controlling the West had some opposition from populists.
I’d be interested in watching that debate.
There are many more able debaters than James to represent his viewpoint. James has a hissy fit when the argument isn’t going his way.
Me too
The one that featured (among others) Hitchens and Kisin was interesting
Yes, let’s have a debate. Let’s find out if Ukraine is a money laundering opportunity for the Biden family and a bio weapons manufacturing facility for western interests and whatever has been going on in that country while we’re at it. The MSM isn’t telling us.
Last sentenced should read, ‘….and whatever else has been going on in that country while we’re at it, that the MSM aren’t telling us’.
I can’t find the edit button!
There is a time out for the Edit button to be available. Move your mouse cursor over the bottom right of the post and it will be found. A gear icon icon line with the comment votes. Yes, kludgy.
The ‘Edit’ sometimes refuses to appear.
Thanks
Either sentence works fine because the MSM certainly hadn’t been telling us what has been going on about anything, anywhere.
True
Correct. Well said.
Cripes, this is some ”accounting error”!
”The Pentagon said Tuesday that it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years — about double early estimates — resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.”
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2023/06/20/pentagon-error-provides-extra-62-billion-for-ukraine-military-aid/
They have spare debt to spend? It reminds me of the joke about the miser’s kid who was beaten for running home behind the bus to save a shilling, when (his Dad said) he should have run home behind a taxi and saved a fiver.
Well, your own ad hominem debating style will hardly advance the cause of truth. I would invite you to address the issues raised in the Redacted video I posted yesterday: https://youtu.be/myRW5CV6Rck
Ah, the old “thwarted the peace deal” stuff again. I dealt with some of that previously (although I don’t recall where — possibly in the comments to an article).
That’s a telling remark. Because you have somehow ‘dealt with’ the peace deal issue somewhere (but you can’t remember where) you write any further discussion off. Not worthy of The Daily Sceptic. This casual dismissal closely parallels your ad hominem style.
Well, actually, any movement towards peace talks seems to be thwarted. Different sides may not agree on the actual starting place but if peace is to be sought, there must be a start. From there, it is a case of exploring the possibilities. Now it seems that no one wants to listen to anyone else and that everything must be exactly as it was in January 2022. That is not realistic.
https://bnn.network/world/austria/ogb-cancels-controversial-vienna-peace-summit-for-ukraine-amid-outrage-and-concerns/
The Biden family can’t afford peace….
Oh well, that is OK if YOU have dealt with it. I bow to your omniscience.
Bankrolling Ukraine and shipping more and more increasingly sophisticated weaponry holding out the promise that they could win isn’t exactly encouraging negotiation. Deal with that.
The odd thing about James’s contribution to the Ukraine discussion was when, finally stung into a response, he questioned whether Toby would want his sons going to fight in Ukraine…. in the event Toby said he’d like them to go there on humanitarian missions.
Still, the point was, that James had one or two arguments to deploy but it took a lot of jabbing by Toby to bring them out.
Good luck with the debate, as James’s infamous appearance on This Week demonstrated, he doesn’t really do rational debate, but remains hugely entertaining among friends.
L Rons Hubbard is a Uketopian apologist – what is there to debate?
US has been staging coups in the Uketopia since 2004. It murdered 15000 Russians in the east in 2014. It broke the Minsk accords. It has 30 biolabs. It money launders millions via the Uketopia. It has weapons pointed across its Uketopian satellite at Russia. It is using its 51rst state to fight a war against Russia and kill innocents in the process.
Are the Russians blameless? Probably not.
But let’s flip it and have the Russians doing the above in say Mexico. If that happened the criminal US would bomb the shit out of Mexico top to bottom, left to right, all to protect ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ ie stolen elections, a totalitarian state and scamdemics.
What L Rons and others can’t understand is that the US is a criminal enterprise and a failed tottering diseased empire. The US, not Russia, is the problem.
Well said.
Debate by all means but you will only really get to waggle your ego about as both are fairly intractable positions that I doubt very much anyone will shift from.
I would say that the lack of any move towards a peace deal is highly telling though. In years gone past, pursuing the path of peace was a civilised approach to limiting conflict. Now it seems that a ‘civilised’ approach to dealing with conflict is to do the exact opposite. To ramp it up and send in increasingly heavy weaponry and risk the use of nuclear weapons. I don’t trust Zelensky. He’s a failed comedian and an actor. The way he pops up – always dressed in olive green as if he personally is on the front line – and speaks to big stages and gatherings and sports events and the way that actors and failed politicians make their way to do homage to him speaks of theatre. It feels wrong and false. Also, I’m sick of seeing the Ukrainian flag flying from church steeples and council offices.
I don’t doubt there are many ordinary Ukrainians caught up in the lies and subterfuge of their own government and who are now dying on battlefields in their hundreds and thousands. Just as happens in most wars. Who benefits? The arms industry, private contractors, security consultants, bankers and all the others who feed on such conflicts. I’m no Putin apologist, he is no saint and is guilty of many crimes, but it wasn’t him pushing NATO membership beyond the boundaries of an agreed treaty nor was it him shelling ethnic Russians in the Donbas region or staging a coup against a democratically elected President.
Christ, what a disgrace this puppet PM is!
‘I’m proud that today we’re announcing a multi year commitment to support Ukraine’s economy – over 3 years we will provide loan guarantees worth $3 billion.’
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks at the Ukraine Recovery Conference as he pledges £2.35 billion in loan guarantees.”
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1671437495417049089
He seems to have missed the fact that Russia is already rebuilding the bits of Ukraine that are now Russian. They appear to be doing a great job in Mariupol.
Why is Britain still in NATO? Debate.
Because vassal states do not secede without bloodshed.
It’s no longer possible to have a useful debate simply about the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine conflict, which has brought into focus far wider questions … the recent history of NATO and the West in the Middle East, Libya, et al … EU empire-building … the role of the Military Industrial Complex … American decay and the corruption of Western democracy … and many more. It’s difficult to imagine Mr. Rons’ abrasive style would add much to our collective understanding.
…I agree…the expansion of NATO, and the encircling of both Russia and China with the bases of their self-proclaimed enemy..the USA…cannot be ignored in a reasoned debate..but is always ignored….
James’s intolerance and lack of civility is concerning. He seems to leap to a conclusion just for the hell of it then lazily doubles down on it when questioned. This came up for me in connection with his claimed Christianity where he seems to want to redefine even basic Christian doctrine to suit his own whims. When I politely pointed this out on his Telegram channel he simply told me to eff off then got angry when I congratulated him on his charm! I’ve since heard of others having similar responses on different topics.
Think you should get the boys from UK Column involved together with Vanessa Beeley and David Clues. Should make for an interesting conversation. Might even make you think again Mr Rons.
Oh and Peter Ford now there’s a man that knows exactly what’s happening.
Give it a rest Ian.
It would be pointless debating with James Dellingpole as he is far too eccentric and a religious fanatic to have any cogent views on an important subject like Ukraine.
James Delingpole, like many Conspiracy Theorists, is far too thin skinned.
I started following him on Telegram and I made one polite comment about agreeing with him that Covid was a scam BUT showing that viruses exist and he blocked me.
I love a good conspiracy.
I supported David Icke for 20 years, bought most of his books, paid a monthly subscription to him, watched him live at Wembley for 10 hours and donated money to his TV project The Peoples Voice.
For about 6 months, I politely debated with people on his forum about Covid being a scam and that the extreme view that viruses do not exist was harming the sceptics fight against the scam.
And one of his administrators, Grumpy Owl, blocked me.
Years ago having been “moderated” by The Guardian for my “below the line” sceptical comments I was one of the first to follow OffGuardian. Two years ago I politely agreed with them that Covid was a scam but SARS-CoV-2, like other viruses, does indeed exist.
One of their administrators, Sophie2, blocked me.
It seems that if you do not agree 100% with these “Conspiracy Theorists” on every subject then they ban you from any sort of debate.
If they were so convinced of their positions you would have thought they would welcome a healthy debate.
It seems they don’t believe in “free speech”.
There are many other people to debate without resorting to those with extreme views just because they have a large following of like minded people who also hold fringe views.
James refuses to debate the Ukraine war because his point is that truth does not work against a narrative. Climate change. Covid. The creators of the narrative are activists who are not interested in the truth, while public opinion simply assumes that all those people can’t be wrong.
And if ever there was a narrative, it is the Ukraine. Look who’s back. Yes it’s the whole gang who brought you the Iraq war and the Beeb annd the Brexit blockers too. The crisis came from nowhere and overnight factories started churning out Ukrainian flags and the name Kiev was declared incorrect. The Blob is at work, and there is no point debating the Blob.
“Never argue with a fool in public lest the public not know which is which.” Unattributed.
I’ll stick to the professional opinions of Major Scott Ritter and Colonel Douglas MacArthur thank you. Both American patriots through and through, but with a deep knowledge of history and a critical appraisal of a wide range of news sources.
*Macgregor