Our NHS is not safe in this Government’s hands

Serco's headquarters in Truro, Cornwall. Photograph: Jim Wileman

Staff and patients of the Cornwall out-of-hours GP service have raised fresh concerns about the level of care being provided by the privatised contractor Serco. They allege that only one GP was on duty from midnight to 8am for the whole county the night of 29 May.
They have also revealed that a switch to a new automated system to deal with patients' calls, in which call handlers following a computer-generated script replace medically trained nurses, led to queues of 40-plus waiting three hours and more for advice over the weekend of 26-27 May.

When Serco was awarded the £6.4m a year contract for out-of-hours GP services last October, one condition was that it introduce a new automated telephone response system that replaces trained nurses with non-medical call handlers to assess initial calls.

This NHS Pathways system has been promoted by the Department of Health as a more efficient and cost-effective way to dealing  with patients contacting out of hours and emergency services.
The Cornwall NHS service was previously run, not for profit, for £7.5m a year by a co-operative of local GPs and trained nurses to assess initial calls.