NHS bosses condemned for giving Management Consultants £7m to teach GPs how to handle budgets
NHS London paid consultancies such as KPMG and McKinsey to receive up to £1.6m each for training groups of family doctors how to handle budgets when they take over the commissioning of care next year.
This move has been criticised as ‘unnecessarily’ diverting funds to private companies by the British Medical Association (BMA) as they believe existing NHS primary care trusts (PCTs) have the same skills and should have been given the job instead.
‘NHS funding is incredibly tight at the moment and this is £7m that’s been spent unnecessarily due to the restructure’ said Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GP committee. ‘There is sufficient expertise within the NHS in London for them not to have needed to use external companies to do this and then this money could have been spent elsewhere, ideally on patient care.’
An internal NHS London document has revealed the top companies that gain as follows:
PricewaterhouseCoopers - £1.61m
KPMG - £1.47m
McKinsey & Co - £1.27m
Critics of this move include Andrew Lansley, Health Secretary, who has cracked down on these types of contracts because of the NHS’s budgetary constraints.
There are eight firms set up across London that are advising 38 GP-led Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which will replace PCTs in April 2013, taking responsibility for patient treatment budgets worth billions of pounds. They are ensuring CCGs"have the business management and leadership expertise need to manage health budgets and meet the health needs of Londoners, working with their partners such as social services", said NHS London.
Private firms have been offered the work partly because of concern that PCTs across the capital would not be able to do it after losing up to 2,000 managers during 2010/11 as part of an NHS-wide drive to reduce management posts, he added.
Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said the fact that only private firms had been selected to carry out the work in the £7m contract was a sign of how the revamped NHS would work. ‘The prime minister has to justify spending this amount of NHS money on private firms at a time of great financial challenge. The government is already wasting £3.45bn on a reckless and unnecessary reorganisation of the NHS and this forced use of private firms is a worrying sign of things to come."’
NHS London said the £7m represented just 0.6% of its total £1.2bn annual "multi-professional education and training budget", which is used for training clinicians, including GPs, and did not affect the delivery of frontline NHS service.
"Developing highly effective clinical commissioning groups is a big challenge in a relatively short space of time. Calling on external expertise will give CCGs the intensive support they need, while helping London's NHS keep a tight grip on performance in the interim," said an NHS London spokesman.
The Department of Health has backed NHS London. "Putting NHS doctors in charge of their own services means they need the right skills and training to manage taxpayer's money responsibly. But in making arrangements for that training we would always urge the NHS to make sure funds were being spent as effectively as possible", said a spokeswoman.