Rishi Sunak has been warned his plan for more private sector partnerships with the NHS in England to cut waiting lists will amount to “reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic” without addressing deeper structural issues with staffing.
The recommendations of an elective recovery plan, published on Friday, were broadly welcomed by opposition parties and health experts, but said to be overdue. Critics also said they only addressed a fragment of the much wider capacity and staffing issues across the whole of the country’s health systems.
In an acknowledgement that the government is still some way off meeting one of Sunak’s five pledges – to cut waiting lists – a health minister, Maria Caulfield, suggested the situation was likely to get worse in the autumn.
There are 7.47 million people in line for treatment – the highest number since records began in 2007. Caulfield told LBC on Friday: “We probably expect, in all honesty, for it to peak in the next few months.”
To help deliver Sunak’s target, plans were unveiled for eight more private sector community diagnostic centres that the government said would be “free at the point of need” to help offer patients a greater choice of venues to receive treatment. Ministers have also said there should be a greater use of the private and third sectors in training junior NHS staff.
While the government has estimated the private diagnostic centres across Bristol, Redruth, Torbay, Yeovil, Weston-super-Mare, Southend, Northampton and south Birmingham would mean an additional 742,000 scans, checks and tests a year, the British Medical Association argued there were serious concerns about how the plan would work in practice.
“We do not have enough staff working in the NHS or the private sector,” said the union’s workforce lead, Dr Latifa Patel. “Doctors working in the private sector are also under pressure, so there is no guarantee that diverting more patients to the independent sector will cut NHS backlogs.”
She added the situation was “a result of a failure to adequately resource the NHS and to address the workforce crisis”, pointing to strike action threatened by junior doctors and consultants.
Ben Howlett, the chief executive of the policy institute Curia and a former Tory MP, said the elective recovery plan amounted to “reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic”.
He added: “Until they’ve fundamentally solved issues with capacity and workforce – which requires support from [home secretary] Suella Braverman to bring in more healthcare workers from overseas, the health secretary will carry on trying to catch their tail.”
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Stephen Dorrell, a former Conservative health secretary who is now a Liberal Democrat, said the NHS had long relied on a partnership between the public and private sectors, so he welcomed the move.
He added: “In a sense, one of the most interesting aspects to this announcement is not that a Tory government is improving links between the NHS and the private sector, it’s that the Labour shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, is criticising the government for not having done it sooner.”
Streeting said the government was “failing to make use of private sector capacity”, leaving patients to pay the price. He added: “If Labour had been in office since January last year, more than 330,000 people would have received the treatment they desperately need. Instead, patients face record waiting times while the Tories dither and delay.”
However, Unite signalled its opposition to relying on the independent sector. Sharon Graham, the union’s general secretary, said the NHS should be “in public hands”. “We will no doubt be overpaying private companies to provide services that should be delivered within our NHS,” she added.
Steve Barclay, the health secretary, defended the move, saying: “We must use every available resource to deliver life-saving checks to ease pressure on the NHS.”
