NHS consultants run private firms charging to cut waiting lists at their own hospitals

Some of the country’s most senior NHS clinicians are earning a lucrative sideline running private firms that offer to cut waiting lists at their own hospitals, the Observer can reveal.

Top consultants in Manchester, Sheffield and London are among directors of “insourcing” agencies that charge the health service to treat patients at weekends and evenings and have won millions of pounds of work.

Some hold leadership roles at NHS trusts that have awarded contracts to their own companies, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

One deputy medical director jointly ran a firm that provided “insourcing” solutions to his own NHS trust before it was sold in a £13m deal last year. Other consultants have set up firms that they and their colleagues work shifts through themselves, often at rates above NHS price caps.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest, an independent thinktank,  called for a ban on such arrangements. The General Medical Council said current conflict of interest policies did not always deliver “the transparency and assurance that patients rightly expect”.

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Source: The Guardian, 12 February 2023