NHS London GPs: Doctorpreneurs transfer NHS contracts to run 49 London GP surgeries to an American corporation

By Paul Coleman

Doctors Usman Quraishi, Muneeb Choudhry, Tarek Radwan, Hasnain Ali Abbasi, Fiyaz Lebbe, and Mohammad Aumran Tahir set up AT Medics in 2004. 

The six doctorpreneurs then bid for lucrative new primary health care contracts called Alternative Provider Medical Services (APMS). Set up by the New Labour government, these contracts allow GPs and their companies to run publicly funded GP surgeries and to employ doctors.

Patients do not pay fees but 'GP consortia' companies can profit from public NHS funds to run GP surgeries.

In early 2020, AT Medics successfully bids for six 'lots' to run GP surgeries, offered under 'PRJ736 London APMS GP Contracts'. These six contracts alone are worth some £121 million.

 

Contracts

By early 2021, AT Medics holds contracts to run 49 GP surgeries that serve 370,000 Londoners across 19 London boroughs (see list below).

The directors receive £5.1m in dividends in the year ending in March 2019.

Turnover is £47.8m for the year ending in March 2020. AT Medics makes an after-tax profit of £7.1m.

 

Takeover

Out of the blue, in February 2021, Operose Health Limited takes over AT Medics - including those contracts to run 49 GP surgeries in London.

The AT Medics doctorpreneurs join the Operose Health board but they are no longer in control. Operose Health is a wholly-owned British subsidiary of the Centene Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange and ranked as the 42nd most successful corporation in the United States.

Centene, in listing its 'product and presence', states 'Operose Health leverages the management of General Practitioner physicians...based on the blueprint outlined by the NHS'.

Centene has studied that blueprint. It knows that NHS England, the body set up in 2011 to commission services for the NHS, has an annual budget nearing £130 billion in 2021.

Operose Health's takeover of AT Medics means Centene now effectively owns those 49 GP surgeries in London.

 

Scrutiny

AT Medics reportedly sought prior authorisation for the Operose deal from NHS England and from 13 Clinical Commissioning Groups. CCGs are the public bodies - led by GPs - that commission GP services for local people.

Each CCG has a Patient Participation Group (PPG) that aims to 'put the patient at the heart of everything it (the CCG) does'.

PPGs might sound as boring as unbuttered toast. However, ignorance and apathy about their function enables CCGs to publish little or no information about the corporate takeover of these GP contracts. The few eagle-eyed patients active in PPGs do not get a proper chance to scrutinise the impact of the deal on GP surgeries.

Hence, Londoners registered at those surgeries are not informed about who now runs their surgeries. The vast majority do not even know they don't know.

For the full story and analysis, visit https://www.londonintelligence.co.uk/nhs/

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, Spring 2021

London Intelligence ® is a registered trademark of London Intelligence Limited.

  

Doctor, just give me the bad news

My friend’s knee was so painfully swollen she could barely walk. “I might just sit in A&E and see if they’ll treat me,” she told me.

Her General Practitioner had just said she might have to wait up to 18 weeks just to see a specialist. “I’m not even allowed to recommend that you have a scan,” said the GP. “Each scan costs the National Health Service £400 so they don’t allow doctors like me to make that decision for our patients.”

The frustrated doctor explained that the emasculation of GPs is just another way that the NHS is being “deliberately rundown” in London. “Soon, the NHS will only be for emergencies,” the doctor said. “It’s being rundown so people will be forced to take out private health insurance.”

The doctor’s bleak outlook is strongly echoed in London’s NHS On The Brink, a report launched today (20 January) by the London Regional Council of the British Medical Association. Health expert and report author John Lister warns record numbers of beds will be cut and hospitals closed if a new government squeezes NHS spending.

In this part of London, - Enfield -  NHS hospitals have struggled for years whilst the Nuffield, Kings Oak and Priory private hospitals have enjoyed sustained growth. Highlands Hospital used to boast its own A&E and other specialist services but the hospital has long since gone, replaced by a bleak, shoddy housing development with a ubiquitous Sainsbury. Grovelands, a temporary hospital for wounded British soldiers, is now a private clinic that sheltered the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he hid from justice in 1998.

But the biggest stink has come from the decision to downgrade the 24/7 A&E service at Chase Farm Hospital along with children and maternity services. Despite concerted protest from local people, including two councillors elected to Enfield Council on a Save Chase Farm ticket, the downgrade goes on.

Lister’s BMA report says Private Finance Initiative projects, like the new Queen’s Hospital in Romford, will throttle London’s health budgets for the next two decades. Building Queen’s Hospital cost £238 million but Barking Havering and Redbridge Trust will have forked out £2.28 billion by the time the PFI contract ends in 2042. Worse still, this isn’t the most expensive of the twenty NHS PFI’s across London.

The BMA concludes London’s healthcare is heading towards a “major financial crisis” and planned cuts and closures are the result of  “secret discussions, plans and briefings that have been organized by NHS London”.  

NHS London say their decisions are “clinically led” and taken with “full consultation with local people”. An NHS spokesman responded to the BMA’s report: “To give people leading expert care we also need to centralise some services.”

Nevertheless, London’s NHS On The Brink contains a dire warning so I’ll be taking a closer look at the report's implications in future postings.

Paul Coleman, London, January 2010.