Private Pathology

The privatisation of NHS pathology laboratories has resulted in much the sort of improvements we have come to expect from the nice people at Serco; in fact, the labs have been efficientised to such a degree that London hospitals are lending the company money. Last year there were four hundred "clinical incidents", including lost and mislaid samples; and early this year a Whitehall-worthy computer-generated farce resulted in one patient having their kidney damage wrongly assessed and another receiving the wrong blood. GSTS, the efficientising company in which Serco owns the majority stake, lost nearly six million pounds last year and is now doing what the private sector does best in such circumstances: namely haemorrhaging experienced staff and finding better uses for money that might otherwise have been frittered away on public health. As one would expect given this record, GSTS is now bidding for more pathology contracts and plans to remove NHS East of England's labs to King's College, which was upgraded at the taxpayer's expense before New New Labour gave it away.