conflicts of interest rife in ccgs

Conflicts of interest rife in health Commissioning groups

DID YOU KNOW?
The head of Strategy and Corporate Services for Preston and Chorley & South Ribble CCG is an ex employee of management consultants KPMG?

The ex KPMG employee is also head of strategy and corporate services for the Our Health Our Care Program, a major local NHS privatisation program led overall by NHS England's 'Simon Stevens', the ex vice president of United Health - the largest private health insurer in the United States.

KPMG - PROMOTING NHS PRIVATISATION
In 2010, while discussing British health reforms at a healthcare industry conference in the USA, Mark Britnell of KPMG was quoted : "In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer", and that "The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years."

CONSERVATIVE MP WORKED FOR KPMG
Tory MP Stephen Dorrell was in a  conflict of interest row after taking up a post with KPMG which was considering bidding for a £1billion deal to manage the medical records of all patients. Mr Dorrell resigned as chairman of the House of Commons Health Select Committee.

Mr Dorrell voted for the Health and Social Care Act in 2012, which opened the NHS to private firms. He said “There is no incompatibility between being an MP and being a KPMG adviser.” but said he would resign at the 2015 May election, after a six month overlap between the two jobs.

KPMG’s healthcare practice earned more than £2billion in revenue in 2014.

https://nhaparty.org/the-anatomy-of-privatisation/kpmg/

As well as KPMG, other big consulting companies like PriceWaterhouseCooper (PwC) McKinsey have been exerting their influence in UK health policy making for some time. Bringing on-board MPs from the front and backbench MPs  shows that PwC wants some more of the action too. Already, two ex-PwC employees sit amongst the seven directors of Monitor [now NHS improvement], and PwC funds interns for a number of politicians.

KPMG, NHS LAND GRABS, AND NHS BOSSES 'OLD FIRM'
In 2015 a list of approved suppliers to the NHS heightened fears of a multi-billion pound land grab by a handful of corporations.

COMMISSIONING SUPPORT SERVICES UNITS (CSUS) - SUPPORTING NHS PRIVATISATION
Competition for contracts to supply 'commissioning support services' to the GP-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will be dominated by management consultancies, outsourcing giant Capita, and the US health insurer UnitedHealth.
NHS England insists that the companies bidding for the support contracts will supply a range of back office functions, cutting procurement times and allowing doctors to focus on how best to spend their £70bn share of the NHS budget.

At the time, the then PM David Cameron said the plan “is to put the power in the hands of local doctors so that they make decisions on behalf of patients based on what is good for health care in their local area”.

But groups opposed to the further privatisation of the NHS claim the reality is that the scope of the private firms is being dramatically expanded so that they will be allowed to provide services that, until now, have been undertaken by the NHS.

They say that the move will end up costing taxpayers more and result in conflicts of interest as a number of the private firms are also advising the GPs’ commissioning groups.

NHS England has rejected these claims.

well they would, wouldn't they....

Four companies dominate the list of approved suppliers published in 2014. Capita, KPMG, PwC and UnitedHealth, the previous employer of NHS CEO, Simon Stevens, are now listed as suppliers to six of the nine regional consortiums set up to help GPs’ commissioning groups procure services.

Ernst and Young is a supplier to four consortiums while McKinsey has been named as a supplier to five. All are members of the Commissioning Support Industry Group, which is a low-profile body that affords them regular access to the senior NHS officials overseeing the creation of the new market in commissioning services.

One regional consortium set up to help GPs’ commissioning groups, the Arden & Greater East Midlands Partnership, paid KPMG more than a quarter of a million pounds a MONTH for the first six months of 2014.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/02/nhs-land-grab-private-firms-health-privatisation-fears

Management consultants such as KPMG, Deloitte,McKinsey, PwC, were being used to support the development of STPs in three out of our four areas. The reasons for this varied. Sometimes they were used to fill gaps in NHS capacity – for example, where there were not enough NHS staff available at short notice to work on the STP.

In other cases, they were used to fill perceived gaps in NHS capability – for example, providing specialist expertise in financial modelling. Some areas were using more than one management consulting firm for different parts of the STP, as well as receiving support from commissioning
support units (CSUs) and academic health science networks (AHSNs). Even in the one STP area that had not directly commissioned external support to develop its plan, NHS England’s regional team had commissioned a management consulting firm to carry out analytical work on behalf of its STP areas.

The use of external advisers to support the planning process was routine.
Some leaders felt that STPs had ‘created an industry’ for management consultants – and questions were raised about why money is being invested in advice from private companies instead of in frontline services. In one area, STP leaders even felt under pressure from NHS England’s regional team to increase the amount of money they were spending on management consultancy support. One leader told us they were ‘picked out’ for not spending enough on their STP programme, compared with other STP areas in the region.

I Hope you found this post/article useful as there is now a big push for multi-million pound contracts being arranged to go to STP regions throughout England that are in the process of setting up shadow American Accountable Care (systems).