Physicians worry for long term of NHS sexual well being clinics beneath tendering regime

Andy Burnham called a letter from sexual wellness specialists and the Royal University of Doctors ‘a severe warning from senior clinicians’. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Sexual wellness services are in danger since they are becoming fought in excess of in a contractual cost-free-for-all in between the NHS and private firms, senior medical doctors are warning.

In an unusual move, representatives of the UK’s hospital physicians and sexual health specialists have written to every regional council in England strongly advising them not to place companies that give contraception and diagnose sexually transmitted infections (STIs) out to competitive tender. Tendering poses several “crucial threats”, which includes lowered accessibility to clinics and remedy, a fall in the high quality of patient care and the undermining of current providers, according to the British Association for Sexual Well being and HIV (Bashh) and the Royal School of Doctors (RCP).

The president of Bashh, Dr Janet Wilson, and her RCP counterpart, Sir Richard Thompson, admit in their letter that tendering can supply greater patient decision, lead to innovation and minimize charges. But they warn: “It does result in considerable disruption and is not without risks. Tendering has negatively impacted on the provision of sexual overall health services, destabilising, disintegrating and fragmenting services, creating substantial uncertainty amongst patients and workers, and lowering all round ranges of patient care.”

They express “grave issues” that enhancements more than the final decade in tackling STIs, which have been rising steadily, “could be reversed with the current trends in tendering and the prospect of wholesale tendering of sexual overall health by regional authorities in the future. This could have critical implications for individuals and the public’s overall health.”

Local councils took over obligation from the NHS for commissioning most sexual wellness providers in the coalition’s controversial overhaul of the NHS in England in April. Whilst they are not obliged to use aggressive tendering, some have already done so, and it is expected that most will follow suit by 2016 in the encounter of deep cuts by Whitehall to a lot of councils’ budgets.

The healthcare leaders have also sent councils a paper detailing the “troubles that have occurred with tendering of sexual wellness services, and with outsourcing of services from the NHS to private and third-sector companies”.

They cite the anonymous instance of a new healthcare operator winning a bid to run a sexual overall health service but then getting to hand back the contract to the original provider soon after it could not locate premises in which to see sufferers. That procurement approach proved “a waste of time and funds”, say Bashh and the RCP, which represents hospital physicians.

In an additional situation, the arrival of a new provider in the area led to “a substantial reduction of sexual wellness solutions for numerous months” until portable buildings could be erected to property the new support, “meaning the service fell properly beneath that which is mandated”.

In other areas, non-NHS suppliers have attempted to minimize the amount of senior medical doctors delivering the services and have excluded them from crucial meetings, and one more non-NHS operator proved unable to provide the providers it had secured since it could not retain staff, while the transfer of contracts has also led to difficulties with the management of health care data, the paper says.

Andy Burnham, the shadow wellness secretary, said the letter and paper had been “a serious warning from senior clinicians of the injury now getting accomplished to the NHS by an obsession with marketplace ideology”. He added: “It is breaking up just before our eyes. Their examination explodes the myth that markets conserve income. The NHS is now wasting millions on competitors attorneys as a direct outcome of David Cameron’s Health Act – funds taken from patient care.”

The doctors’ intervention would boost the increasing pressure across the NHS for a relaxation of rules created to entrench competitors, Burnham predicted.

The Division of Health declined to reply straight to the doctors’ issues or the examples they cited. “As this paper factors out, there is no requirement for regional authorities to make sexual wellness providers subject to competitive tendering. But the NHS and nearby authorities should operate collectively to make confident that sexual health services are practical and work for individuals,” mentioned a DoH spokeswoman.

Its sexual wellness improvement framework, published earlier in the year, “puts patients and the public at the heart of commissioning HIV services – and this involves focusing on prevention and early diagnosis”, she added.

Physicians worry for long term of NHS sexual well being clinics beneath tendering regime