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Home| 10/02/11 |
| PFI hampered hospital building and ‘endangers patient care’ – report Many more hospitals could have been built without so much PFI influence on NHS capital funding, academics have claimed. Professor Allyson Pollock and colleagues at the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh, say: “NHS PFI contracts are not good value and are endangering patient care.” Health trusts ended up paying far too much for new buildings under PFI, which was used to build 101 of the 135 new hospitals between 1997 and 2009. In the study, published on the bmj.com website, the authors say the annual debt repayments to PFI consortia are between 1.49 and 2.4 times higher than the amount that would have been charged to the UK government if they had borrowed the money themselves, which they call a “one hospital for the price of two” policy. The report says: “The taxpayer and NHS patient is paying several times over: the multi-billion pound government bail out of the banks coupled with the debts incurred on PFI schemes underpin the current reductions in public expenditure and public services. Cuts in NHS funding and the high cost of PFI debt charges translate into staff redundancies, service closures and reductions in access to and quality of care for patients.”The study is available at www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.d324 |
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