A tribunal has found Dr Sarah Benn’s fitness to practise to be impaired
The British Medical Association (BMA) has said it is “very concerned” by a tribunal’s finding that a doctor’s participation in Just Stop Oil protests amounted to professional misconduct.
The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service ruled Dr Sarah Benn’s fitness to practise was impaired and said it must consider whether a sanction should be imposed on her registration.
The General Medical Council (GMC), which referred the case, said the hearing was convened due to the fact her actions at Kingsbury oil terminal in Warwickshire broke the law and resulted in her imprisonment.
But Dr Emma Runswick, BMA deputy chair of council, said there was “no possible public or patient interest” in such circumstances for proceedings where potential sanctions included the removal of a doctor’s licence.
Addressing the tribunal’s findings, Dr Runswick said the BMA was concerned Dr Benn’s registration as a doctor could be threatened for taking part in peaceful protests relating to the climate change emergency.
Medical consultant members of the British Medical Association (BMA) on the picket line outside University College London (UCL) hospital as consultants took industrial action for the first time in more than a decade. Picture date: Thursday July 20, 2023.
NURSES were left infuriated today after the government made an improved pay offer for hospital consultants in England.
The Department of Health and Social Care said that it had reached an agreement with the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) after a month of talks and more than six months of strikes.
Union members will now vote on the deal which offers the majority of consultants an additional uplift of up to 12.8 per cent from next January — more than double the minimum of 6 per cent in 2023/24 as a result of the previously implemented pay award — although it won’t be paid until April.
BMA consultants committee chair Dr Vishal Sharma said: “It is a huge shame that it has needed consultants to take industrial action to get the government to this point when we called for talks many months ago.”
Sunak met with the CEOs of several UK private health corporations in Number 10 in December. | No 10 Downing Street
Rishi Sunak hosted a meeting with seven bosses from the UK’s biggest private health companies to discuss how to tackle the NHS backlog, openDemocracy can reveal.
Campaigners have raised concerns that the close involvement of private healthcare corporations in the government’s response to the NHS crisis will benefit shareholders at the expense of public investment.
The government announced the creation of the Elective Recovery Taskforce in December to provide advice on how to “turbocharge NHS recovery from the pandemic, reduce waiting times for patients and eliminate waits for routine care of over a year by 2025”.
At the time, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) refused to give openDemocracy details of the group’s members, or say who had attended its launch at Number 10 led by the PM and health secretary Steve Barclay in December.
A guestlist for the event, obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request, reveals that half a dozen CEOs from private health firms were in attendance.
Guests included the chief execs of the UK’s two largest private hospital operators: Paolo Pieri, the chief exec of Circle Health Group, and Justin Ash, who heads up Spire Healthcare. Also present was Jim Easton, the chief executive of Practice Plus Group, the NHS’s top private healthcare provider.
They were joined by David Hare, the chief executive of Independent Healthcare Provider Network, a lobby group that represents for-profit and not-for-profit private health organisations including Bupa and HCA, one of the biggest healthcare facility companies in the US.
Private health tycoons have wined and dined senior ministers while cashing in on NHS contracts
The private healthcare executives, which also included CEOs from Horder Healthcare, Newmedica, InHealth and Medefer, outnumbered the five NHS England directors invited to the event.
DHSC said it could not provide openDemocracy with minutes from the meeting because none were taken, and refused to share any papers handed out to attendees.
Separately, the government quietly published a list of members of the Elective Recovery Taskforce on Monday. The 16-person group includes DHSC ministers, six NHS bosses, and Hare.
Other members include Bill Morgan, a private healthcare lobbyist whose past clients included Virgin Care, who was appointed a Number 10 adviser in November, and Paul Manning, an NHS consultant surgeon who is also chief medical officer for Circle Healthcare.
The government said the role of the task force would be to “shape proposals for how the healthcare system can make use of all resources at its disposal, further tackling the backlog caused by the Covid-19 pandemic”. It will conclude its work in March.
Last week, the prime minister said he had signed up to an NHS GP after the Guardian reported that he had registered with a private clinic in west London that charges £250 for a consultation.
Tony O’Sullivan, a retired consultant paediatrician and co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, told openDemocracy: “The head parasites are at the table to maximise future extraction of NHS funds.”
He added: “This is an important disclosure extracted from the government proving the direction of travel – to continue disinvesting in the NHS and increase its enforced dependence on private health care.
“The private sector was bailed out during Covid, has a lucrative four-year £10bn deal ongoing and is also in a position to earn massive profits from patients forced to go privately to avoid NHS queues of 7.2 million.”
openDemocracy has no paywall and relies on the backing of thousands of our readers to make stories like this freely available to everyone. You cansupport our work by making a donation here.
Private health firms have donated more than £800,000 to the Conservative Party over the past ten years, openDemocracy can reveal.
This includes companies run by wealthy tycoons who have wined and dined former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Theresa May and other senior ministers.
Rishi Sunak’s party has accepted huge donations from private health firms.
The finding comes as the government hands out more NHS contracts to the private sector in a bid to tackle the backlog in the health service.
The British Medical Association has warned that relying on the private sector threatens the “sustainability of the NHS”, which has suffered from “a decade of underinvestment”.
Now, an investigation by openDemocracy reveals how Rishi Sunak’s party has received at least £800,000 from more than 35 private health and social care businesses. The true figure could be even higher because donors do not have to declare their field of work, meaning some may have flown under the radar.
And this is on top of huge personal donations from some of the business moguls behind these private healthcare companies.
Health profits
The Conservative Friends of the NHS is a group of Tory-voting doctors and health professionals who claim to support the NHS. The group’s president is health minister Maria Caufield and it has hosted stalls at the Conservative Party’s annual conference.
Chohan is a private health tycoon who set up a portfolio of medical and nursing businesses in London. One of his firms, West End Medical Practice Limited, has donated more than £198,000 to the Tories since 2019 – making it one of the sector’s biggest political donors.
As chair of the Conservative Friends of the NHS, Chohan has met with senior politicians, including Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Nadhim Zahawi. Before Christmas, in the midst of the ongoing NHS crisis, he also attended a “meaningful” meeting at Number 10.
Despite the group’s claim to support the NHS, it has repeatedly championed a two-tier health system on Twitter, saying the private sector “should be applauded for reducing demand for the NHS”. In other tweets it has advocated health insurance and argued that “all high taxpayers must have [private health] insurance by 2025”.
Experts say reliance on private health firms is creating a system in which poorer people who cannot afford to go private are “left to put up or shut up”.
NHS outsourcing to the private sector has also been linked to higher mortality rates. And hospitals that use private cleaning companies have been linked with higher rates of the MRSA superbug.
NHS outsourcing to the private sector has been linked to higher mortality rates.
During the pandemic, Chohan – who previously donated to Labour before switching – came under scrutiny over two private firms he ran with his son that sold Covid tests. Reports said customers were charged between £80-£200 for the PCR tests, but many complained about lost samples and refused refunds.
Another Conservative Party donor is Genix Healthcare Ltd, which is part of a group of private dental clinics that makes the “majority” of its £6.6m income from NHS contracts.
The company was set up in response to the “severe shortage of NHS dentists” and says it aims to become the “dental corporate of choice for the NHS”.
Genix Healthcare has bankrolled the Tories with donations worth more than £158,000 since 2015, including cash and sponsorships.
Its owner, Mustafa Mohammed, who has posed for photos with Johnson and May and boasted about owning a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes S-Class, has also given almost £225,000 of his own money to the party.
This includes a £20,000 donation to Jeremy Hunt in 2019, the year after he resigned as health secretary.
As one of the party’s top donors, Mohammed has been part of an elite Tory dining club called the Leader’s Group, which enjoys regular access to the prime minister and senior government figures.
Care homes and GPs
The majority of Tory donations from the private health sector have come since the pandemic began in 2020.
One such donor, Doctor Care Anywhere Group PLC, has given the party more than £37,000 in the past two years – and reportedly spent £1,000 on a ticket for government minister Paul Scully to watch a cricket match at Lord’s.
The company, which charges up to £60 for a single telephone call with a GP, raked in £25m revenue in the 2021 financial year.
Yet its records from last year say that a “severe shortage of GPs in the UK” has meant the firm’s “clinician capacity is currently insufficient to meet patient demand”. Bosses said they would not try to incentivise staff with additional pay rises because this would impact on Doctor Care Anywhere’s “cash generation”.
The Conservatives also accepted £28,000 worth of donations from Advinia Health Care Limited, which operates a network of 36 care homes across the UK.
The company has earned huge amounts of public money and boasted almost £96m in turnover in its latest financial accounts. From this, Advinia took more than £1.8m of pre-tax profits.
“Approximately 80% of group revenues came from state-funded Local Authorities and CCGs [clinical commissioning groups],” the company’s 2021 report says, adding that the taxpayer money “provide[s] the group steady, secure and timely cash inflows”.
But despite its healthy finances, Advinia’s founder and chairman, Dr Sanjeev Kanoria, recently called on Sunak to increase the government’s financial support to private care homes.
The Tories continued to accept donations from Advinia Health Care even after questions were raised about its finances. In 2019, the Guardian reported that the company had been placed under investigation by regulators over concerns about its cash flow and financial management. It was also claimed that bosses had refused to agree to an independent audit of its finances.
The true owners of Advinia Health Care remain unknown, thanks to the company’s financial structure. Records say the ultimate controlling party is the ‘Paraman Trust Settlement’, but there is no explanation of what this is, where it is located, or who is behind it. There is no trace of the Paraman Trust Settlement on the UK’s official company registry and little mention of it anywhere online.
Money donated by companies like Advinia Health Care comes on top extra cash that has been personally given by wealthy business tycoons in the health sector.
They include Dolar Popat, who has donated more than £188,000 in the past decade. Popat used to run a care home business and was appointed to the House of Lords in 2010.
John Nash is another former private healthcare tycoon who has donated to the Conservatives and been made a peer. Nash is the former chairman of Care UK, which operates 150 residential homes for elderly people.
Another firm, Babylon Healthcare, which provides GP consultations over the phone, also came under the spotlight recently amid reports that shareholders had donated to the former health secretary, Matt Hancock.
Medical body calls for ‘immediate action’ as Royal College of Emergency Medicine reiterates claims over deaths caused by care delays
The pressure on the NHS is “intolerable and unsustainable”, medics have said, amid warnings that the deaths of up to 500 people each week could be caused by delays in emergency care.
It comes after more than a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services declared critical incidents over the festive period, with officials citing rising flu cases and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic among the reasons for the pressure on the health service.
Prof Phil Banfield, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) council, hit out at both the prime minister and the health secretary. Highlighting the scale of the crisis facing healthcare workers, he called the government’s decision not to negotiate with medics a “political choice” that is leading to patients “dying unnecessarily”.
“The current situation in the NHS is intolerable and unsustainable, both for our patients and the hardworking staff desperately trying to keep up with incredibly high levels of demand,” he said.
