Guest blog by Sarah Cox:
If the Accident and Emergency
Department at Central Middlesex Hospital closes, as proposed in every option in
the NHS NW London consultation document Shaping
a Healthier Future, residents in Brent’s poorest wards with the greatest
health needs will be at the mercy of private health care provider Care UK which
runs the Urgent Care Centre at Central Middlesex.
Urgent Care Centres are
designed to take the pressure off A & E departments by dealing with minor
injuries and less serious illnesses. Fine, but one of the reasons people go to
their doctors or to A & E when the doctor isn’t available, is that they are
not medically qualified so don’t necessarily know how serious (or not) their
condition is. One of the NW London NHS documents gives the example of a mother
who takes her baby to A & E with a high temperature. She is told that the
baby is just teething. One of the functions of qualified medical staff should
be to reassure patients. What about the case where the baby’s high temperature
is not caused by teething but is a symptom of meningitis? Meningitis is hard to
diagnose, but if not treated very quickly, can be fatal. There have been
reports of Urgent Care Centres failing to spot meningitis and sending a stroke
victim home http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5185165/Urgent-care-centres-putting-patients-lives-at-risk-doctors-warn.html
As a patient, Care UK’s
record doesn’t fill me with confidence:
X-rays: At
the CMH Urgent Care Centre, Care UK failed to carry out the required checks on 6,000 x-rays, missing such details as
broken bones http://www.channel4.com/news/flaw-leads-to-review-of-patient-x-ray%20records. All x-rays should
be reviewed by a specialist to make sure that nothing has been missed, they
should also be checked against the child protection register and GPs should be
informed when their patients have attended the UCC. Care UK neglected
to do this and took more than a year to find the flaw in their system and start
to review the x-rays. Channel 4 reports, ‘Asked how it had happened, Care UK blamed it on "a couple of changes in the
management structure of the team that ran the centre". They also failed to
report it to the Care Quality Commission. Care UK
said that although it was not legally obliged to do this, it "probably
should have told CQC, but nobody picked up the phone".’ What a caring
attitude!
The contract to run the CMH
Urgent Care Centre was given to Care UK by the former Brent Primary Care Trust. All eight Brent NHS clinical directors wrote urging
them not to sign the contract, but were told they were too late. Former members
of that PCT are now non-executive directors of Care UK and NHS Brent is tied
into a contract with Care UK that they cannot get out of.
Friends in high places: The wife of Care UK’s then chairman gave £21,000 to
Andrew Lansley when he was shadow Health minister to help run his constituency
office in the run up to the general election, an investment that has certainly paid
off when you see how many contracts the firm has been awarded in the NHS and
social care sectors.
Tax avoidance
Care UK, which operates NHS treatment
centres, walk-in centres and mental health services, has a reduced tax bill by
taking out loans through the Channel Islands stock exchange and coming to an
agreement with HMRC Guardian 17.3.12 Care
UK join the likes of Vodaphone and Jimmy Carr in claiming that they’ve done
nothing wrong.
There’s more about Care UK,
but I’ll leave that for the next instalment. What’s your experience of Care UK
or specifically of the Urgent Care Centre at Central Middlesex?
