Canary columnist and ardent anti-NHS-privatisation campaigner Dr Julia Grace Patterson has once again exposed the rot festering at the heart of the UK’s healthcare system. Creeping NHS privatisation is in full swing – not least in mental health services, as damning new figures show.
Specifically, Patterson’s advocacy group EveryDoctor dug up the money the NHS has thrown at the private sector for mental health beds since 2019. The findings were staggering.
NHS privatisation: mental health beds making corporations a killing
As the Big Issue reported:
The NHS in England spent more than £1.4bn of public money on private mental health beds between 2019 and 2024.
The eye-watering figure was uncovered through Freedom of Information requests.
Moreover, as the outlet noted, this was largely driven by a rapid drop in the number of mental health beds across the NHS. In particular, it highlighted that between 1988 and 2019, mental health beds in the NHS dropped nearly three-quarters, from 67,100 to 18,400. Of course, successive, mostly Tory government cuts to the NHS and public spending en masse have fomented this critical collapse in provision.
According to the Independent, the Tories’ ruthless austerity politics oversaw a 25% drop from just 2010 to 2021 alone. This equated to the loss of approximately 6,000 mental health beds in the public health service.
As a result, government spending on private mental health beds has sky-rocketed. In just the past five years, this has risen by 68%. However, as the Big Issue highlighted, in some areas, the figures were in fact much worse. It revealed that:
Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust told EveryDoctor it was spending ten times as much on private mental health beds in 2024 as it had in 2019. Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust’s spending jumped from £3.8m in 2019/20 to a staggering £40m in 2023/24. In Dorset, the mental health trust was spending just £800,000 on beds in 2019/20 but by 2023/24 this rose to £6.6m.
Profiteering private US healthcare firm
The biggest private provider cashing in from the Tory’s manufacturing of a mental health bed crisis, was Cygnet Health Care. Its parent company Universal Health Services (UHS) is based in the US. Unsurprisingly, the health care giant has a chequered history of scandal. Not least, as the Canary’s Megan Sherman detailed in November 2023, the “fraudulent detentions of psychiatric patients for profit.”
And like parent company, like subsidiary. Cygnet Health Care itself has a damning rapsheet of allegations to its name too. Sherman has argued these amount to:
an institutional culture of human rights abuse
Crucially, she documented the multiple investigations into Cygnet’s:
widespread use of cruel and unusual punishment, in which physical and chemical restraints, supposedly a last resort option implemented on a case-by-case basis, are normalised, standardised procedure, even when the patient poses no threat, accompanied by boasts from abusive nurses about the damage they inflicted captured in undercover footage.
This is the company now making an ostensible killing from private mental health bed across the UK. Big Issue underscored that during EveryDoctor’s FOI period, it had reported overall profits of more than £84m.
Severing support networks for vulnerable patients
Apart from the appalling allegations of abuse at Cygnet private health facilities, the lack of NHS mental health beds has been having other devastating impacts on patient care as well. Big Issue noted that in 2023:
NHS England recorded 280,000 patient days of ‘out of area’ mental health placements with independent providers.
In other words, the lack of NHS mental health beds means the service is shipping mental health patients away from home. As a result, this sordid state of affairs is cutting vulnerable patients off from their community’s and family-friend support networks.
Given EveryDoctor’s latest findings, Patterson told the Big Issue that:
NHS staff have spoken up repeatedly about the lack of hospital beds and the false economy of outsourcing care to private companies, and have mostly been ignored. Meanwhile, enormous sums of public money are being funnelled into private companies.
Private companies have no place in the delivery of public healthcare, because profit creation is often not aligned with the interests of patients, or the staff who aim to provide excellent care within a sustainable service.
However, with Wes Streeting’s penchant for privatisation, and his plans to plug the paucity in NHS care with the private sector, it doesn’t look like this is about to change anytime soon.
Feature image via Youtube/the Canary
