Date: 21 November 2011

The operating of Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon is to be taken over by a private company from February next year. The plan is that doctors and nurses will have much more say in the running of the hospital and that this will help it to become more efficient and pay off its huge debts. The company involved, Circle, has experience of providing medical care for the NHS in Independent Treatment Centres providing for example knee and hip replacement surgery, but not of running a full range of services including maternity care and emergency services. There will be pressures to reduce the debt and make profits for their backers, and Unions fear services will be affected and staff numbers could be cut.

Sandra Patton, a specialist medical injury lawyer at Ashton KCJ comments: "Anything that improves efficiency and patient safety is welcome but why the NHS cannot manage to achieve this in-house is a mystery. Efficiency savings should be put back into the NHS, not into private pockets. I sincerely hope we are not heading for the fiasco we have had with some private providers where things went badly wrong and we then had a further argument as to whether it was the NHS or the private provider who was responsible."