Not overpaid by a long shot
I’m glad to see that the push to demonise doctors as greedy fat cats has had less of an impact on the public at large. The latest YouGov poll for the Sunday Times reports that precisely 0% of the public thought that doctors were overpaid in a group that included lawyers (3%) & politicians (7%). In other words, the media messages have had less direct impact than supposed though they have indirectly poisoned the atmosphere by including them in this comparison in the first place. But the profession needs to be better at PR & as I have said before, the BMA is ill served by its current services.
The BUPA (Guardian & Telegraph) & Boots (Independent) distress sales make the headlines in all papers but there is little new to add. The board of BUPA has issued a statement confirming the strategy which for the record I feel is the wrong one. They are giving up too soon into the game though it is not particularly fair that the NHS is paying competitors to build facilities.
A £1.2bn bidding battle for BUPA’s hospitals is looming after Britain’s largest private healthcare group said it was in talks with potential buyers for the division.
Private equity groups are lining up to examine the 26-strong hospitals business, which BUPA yesterday confirmed was under review.
BUPA’s long standing adviser Citigroup is handling the auction, although BUPA said the ”discussions may or may not lead to a decision to sell BUPA Hospitals”.
In a statement yesterday the group said: ”The board confirms that it is undertaking a review to establish whether, given the significant changes in the UK healthcare economy and in particular the increasing role the private sector is playing in that market, there may be benefits for the customers and other stakeholders of BUPA Hospitals and the BUPA Group in a sale of BUPA Hospitals.
”We are in preliminary discussions with potential purchasers.”
As well as trade buyers, such as the French private health group Générale de Santé, the hospitals will attract private equity interest.Blackstone, Cinven and Australia’s Macquarie Bank are seen as possible bidders. It is yet to be decided if the buyer can keep the Bupa brand.
The UK private hospital market is dominated by six organisations: the NHS and five private groups, including Bupa. At least two have already been acquired by private equity firms. General Healthcare, which operates 49 private hospitals in the UK, was sold to a consortium led by the South African healthcare group Netcare and the private-equity company Apax Partners in May. And HCA International, which owns six hospitals in London, including the Harley Street Clinic and the Wellington hospital, was acquired by three US private-equity firms last July.
I hope that this display of vulnerability doesn’t come back to haunt them if they decide not to go ahead with a sale.
Hospices are the forgotten arm of the healthcare sector, depending on charitable fund-raising for two thirds of their costs. And they are vulnerable to the same pressures as faced by the rest of the NHS, with intense pressure on beds & staff. The £40 million pounds announced will not go very far.
On a clinical note, I like this! Why on earth are we still fiddling around with ophthalmoscopes? This & digital retinal imaging would revolutionise care if widely adopted. i.e were in every ophthalmic A&E dept.
The Optomap, a laser-scanning system produced by Optos examines up to 80 per cent of the retina in apainless, noninvasive process that takes a fraction of a second. Conventional examination techniques enable a clinician to see only 20 to 25 per cent of the retina: in the words of one optometrist this “is like looking into a large room with a small windowâ€. If dilating drops are used on the pupil 70 to 75 per cent of the retina can be examined, but the patient is left with blurred vision for several hours.
Add fiddly & time-consuming to that list with most doctors having very little skill or experience.
Six years after the Optomap was launched, and only after the $150,000 (£80,000) equipment was made available through a pay-per-use scheme, there are only 3,000 machines in the US, and a paltry 80 in the UK.
This is surely the root of the debate: money. Kevin Lewis, president of the College of Optometrists, uses the Optomap for about 1,000 patients a year at his practice in Thurrock, Essex, and says that in less than four years “I have picked up 150 things I would have missed, 12 have been immediately life savingâ€.