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The health service emergency is no accident
If you need a hospital now, you may not realise you are being robbed at the door as private firms cash in on A&E – with Labour waiting in the wings to bring in even more privatisation, warns SOLOMON HUGHES
8 - A&E

PRIVATE healthcare firms are now so embedded in the NHS that they literally guard the entrance to A&E. And they are using their strategic position of controlling access to A&E to extract millions for their shareholders.

Back in 2017, NHS England ordered a “standardisation” of urgent treatment centres. This encouraged a movement from a variety of community-based minor injuries-type clinics to a growing number of privately run urgent treatment centres, which are “typically based at the front of A&E, where they divert these minors away from A&E.”

NHS England believes this scheme might reduce demand on A&Es, by taking the least urgent injuries out of the emergency ward. Health companies see it as a major business opportunity.

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