Does Labour’s plan to “rescue the NHS” involve further privatisation?

Earlier this week Councillor Phil Davies was quoted in the Wirral Globe as saying “Voters have a straight choice between the Tories’ cuts and failed austerity measures, and Labour’s plan to rescue Arrowe Park Hospital and introduce policies to raise living standards for hard-working families.”

So what is Labour’s plan to “rescue Arrowe Park Hospital”?

A report to the Health and Wellbeing Board (chaired by Councillor Phil Davies), which meets on the 15th April shows a bid to be a “vanguard site” was recently agreed. £200 million of public money will be shared across the 29 vanguard sites across England.

The vanguard site bid was jointly submitted by Wirral Council, various NHS bodies including the part that runs Arrowe Park Hospital, Cerner Ltd, Advocate Physician Partners ACO Inc and the Kings’ Fund.

So let’s just look at the history of one of these organisations involved in the joint bid.

Cerner Ltd is a subsidiary of an American corporation called the Cerner Corporation. Both Cerner Ltd and its parent company Cerner Corporation provide software for electronic health records to hospitals.

In 2005 Cerner Corporation paid the RAND corporation to write a report which stated the US healthcare system could save $81 billion by switching to electronic healthcare record systems.

However, after the American government had changed funding rules to give hospitals an incentive to switch to electronic health care records, the RAND corporation in 2013 decided that their earlier figure of $81 billion savings was “overstated”.

The vanguard site bid has phrases in it which echo the overly optimistic tone of the 2005 RAND report:

“This will have the dual focus of reducing health inequalities while achieving costs savings through and reduced inefficiency and duplication.”

“This results in more efficiency, improved health outcomes and significant cost savings for patients.”

So is this Labour’s plan to “rescue Arrowe Park Hospital”? To hear more about why Monitor (the regulator) are investigating Arrowe Park Hospital you can hear the detail at a recent meeting of the Families and Wellbeing Policy and Performance Committee below:

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