Labour shrugs off criticism of heart hospital purchase

Ministers attempted to shrug off suggestions on Wednesday that taxpayers were propping up the independent health sector after the NHS bought back a private hospital.

The unprecedented £27.5m purchase of the revamped Heart Hospital, in central London, has left union officials uneasy because the hospital will continue to treat about 600 private patients a year despite its new public role.

In addition, 162 staff at the hospital transferring to the NHS will retain their superior private sector salaries, creating a two-tier pay structure.

Ministers said the deal, which was sealed on Monday, was a "golden opportunity" to improve capacity for heart surgery in London.

But Geoff Martin, London convenor of Unison, claimed the purchase was a "bail-out" rather than a renationalisation. "This hospital will not be totally dedicated to NHS patients," he said.

"This is a rescue operation, which nails the lie that the private sector is better at running public services.

"We are obviously glad that the staff are being rescued, but it raises questions about different rates of pay within the NHS."

The Liberal Democrat health spokesman Evan Harris said yesterday: "The cost of paying private sector salaries for the clinical staff in this unit still makes it a more expensive option than expansion of existing NHS facilities."

The move to bring the hospital back under the wing of the NHS should lead to shorter waiting lists because it will double the number of cardiac operations performed in London. The Health Minister Hazel Blears said that the deal would mean it became a world-class NHS hospital and its staff NHS employees.

The Heart Hospital will now be run by the University College London Hospitals Trust. All UCLH heart services at the Middlesex Hospital will be transferred to the Heart Hospital, and a new diagnostic and treatment centre will open at the Middlesex, enabling the NHS to carry out an extra 200 operations a year.

NHS chief executive Nigel Crisp said: "The purchase was an opportunity not to be missed and will bring a huge boost to the NHS."

The hospital's former owner, the Singapore-based Parkway Group Healthcare, sold the 95-bed unit because it was struggling to attract patients.

Parkway paid £60m to buy the Heart Hospital from the NHS in 1991. The hospital's chairman, Sir Richard Needham, said the NHS had, therefore, doubled its money and had a "tip" of a hospital transformed into a state-of-the-art service in the interim.

The Royal College of Nursing's London director, Tom Sandford, said the buy represented good value for money but he said it did not represent a solution for the rest of the country.

The British Medical Association said that the mix of private and public patients was pragmatic and good news for the capital.

However, a spokesman for the GMB union said: "We have got to stop running the NHS like a business and start running it like a service."