PFI hospitals failing, say unions
pharmafile | October 27, 2003 | News story | |
Hospitals built under the private finance initiative are suffering from financial problems, bed shortages and poor design, according to a new report.
The 'PFI Experience' was based on interviews with staff working in the hospitals and was written for public sector union Unison. It paints a highly critical picture of PFI and its effects on patient care and staff.
All of the first-wave PFI hospitals are short of beds and several of the hospitals opened since 2000 are already looking to build extensions or have had to resort to using Portakabins.
Buildings were "riddled with structural and design problems", according to the report.
A Stroke Specialist Nurse at Norfolk & Norwich PFI Hospital said: "The hospital seems to be continually in a beds crisis. Given that the hospital is smaller than the one we moved from and that they had a chance to build on a clear site suggests that the hospital was built too small, which in turn suggests that it was to save money".
All of the nine trusts surveyed for the report face extremely serious financial problems, party through costs incurred from PFI and partly as a result of the pressure on front-line capacity, Unison said.
Dave Prentis, Unison's General Secretary, said: "The government are sticking their heads in the sand about the growing financial costs of PFI. But if they won't listen to us when we say PFI is failing miserably, perhaps they will listen to staff on the frontline".
"It is tragic that such a large and welcome hospital investment programme should have produced such universally poor results".
The Department of Health said PFI hospitals do deliver value for money for the NHS and dismissed Unison's arguments as flying in the face of independent evidence from the National Audit Office.
"Unison have always been ideologically opposed to PFI and we are familiar with all their arguments against it", a DoH spokeswoman said.
She added: "Any problems in design or construction, bed numbers, workload or capacity have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a hospital has been funded under PFI".
