Hinchingbrooke Hospital
| Hinchingbrooke Hospital | |
|---|---|
| Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust | |
| Geography | |
| Location | Hinchingbrooke Park, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Coordinates | 52°19′58″N 0°12′04″W / 52.3329°N 0.2011°WCoordinates: 52°19′58″N 0°12′04″W / 52.3329°N 0.2011°W |
| Organisation | |
| Care system | Public NHS |
| Hospital type | General |
| Services | |
| Emergency department | Yes Accident & Emergency |
| Beds | 266 |
| History | |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Links | |
| Website | hinchingbrooke.nhs.uk |
| Lists | Hospitals in England |
Hinchingbrooke Hospital is a small district general hospital in Hinchingbrooke near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. It is led by a board, including Chair Hilary Daniels and Chief Executive Lance McCarthy.
Opened in 1983, it serves the Huntingdonshire area, and has a range of specialities as well as an Accident and Emergency. It had 310 acute beds in 2007, now reduced to 223, including 24 specifically for day cases. It was formerly administered by Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust, which had long-standing financial problems. It was obliged to borrow £27.3 million in Public Dividend Capital in 2006–07. In 2011 it became the first NHS hospital to be run by a private company, Circle Health. Although the hospital was managed privately, the buildings were still under public ownership by the NHS. This process was widely criticised as a significant step in the privatisation of the NHS in England.
Mitie has been providing domestic cleaning services, waste collection, pest control and external window cleaning at the hospital since 2009.
The franchise winner was announced to be Circle Health on 25 November 2010. The project has been conducted by the NHS East of England Strategic Projects Team. On 10 November 2011 it was confirmed that Hinchingbrooke Hospital would be administered by Circle Health from February 2012. Circle has a ten-year contract to manage the hospital, which has heavy financial debts. In 2012 losses doubled, and Circle obtained a £4 million advance on fees to ease cash flow problems at the hospital.
BBC Newsnight produced a programme about the hospital in August 2012 where Ali Parsa showed how “reactive, motivated staff treat patients better; happy, well-fed patients heal better”.
In November 2012 a National Audit Office (NAO) report into the franchise was published. It found that while Circle had made early improvements in some clinical areas, the in-year deficit was already £2.2 million higher than planned. Circle will have to generate unprecedented levels of savings to pay the deficit and most of the savings are expected in the later years of the ten-year franchise, so the value for money of the project cannot easily be assessed for some time. The NAO found that while NHS East of England had assessed bidders’ savings proposals, the relative risks had not been fully considered, which had the potential to encourage over-optimistic bids.
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