BMJ 1997;314:1619 (31 May)

Letters

What happens when the private sector plans hospital services for the NHS

Authors' figures were wrong for Edinburgh ...

Editor–Allyson M Pollock and colleagues state that they had difficulty in obtaining business plans, planning documents, and accurate bed numbers from all the trusts that they looked at.1 None of the authors requested detailed information from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh NHS Trust; had they done so the trust would have corrected several mistakes in their assumptions, in the data that they used, and therefore in their conclusions. The Lothian acute services strategy was published in 1992, before the government introduced the private finance initiative. The bed numbers in that strategy are consistent with those being planned today and reflect the closure of smaller hospitals. The authors are wrong to assert that the private sector planned the size of the hospital and that, had public sector finance been available, different planning guidelines would have been used that would have led to a larger . . . [Full text of this article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

What happens when the private sector plans hospital services for the NHS: three case studies under the private finance initiative
Allyson M Pollock, Matthew Dunnigan, Declan Gaffney, Alison Macfarlane, and F Azeem Majeed
BMJ 1997 314: 1266. [Extract] [Full Text]

Access jobs at BMJ Careers
Whats new online at Student BMJ