Worcestershire hospital trust pays £1m to private clinic run by consultants

A hospital trust has launched an investigation after patients were referred to a private clinic run by two consultants.

A Birmingham Mail investigation found Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust paid £1m to the Spire Hospital which paid a proportion to Worcestershire Bowel Clinic to treat patients.

The clinic is run by Stephen Lake and Steve Pandey, both of whom are employed by the trust.

A spokesman for the trust said the consultants deny any wrongdoing.

The trust said: "Both consultants declared an interest [to the trust] in 2015.

"We have not been able to trace any formal declaration of interest from either of the consultants prior to this but this doesn't necessarily indicate any wrongdoing."

More on this and other stories from Hereford and Worcester

Services had been moved to Worcestershire Royal Hospital from others run by the trust, including the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch.

Neal Stote, from the Save the Alex group, which has campaigned about the removal of services from Redditch to Worcester, said the issue was "indicative" of problems at the trust.

Before, bowel surgery was done at both Redditch and at Worcester and a decision was taken to concentrate services at the Worcester hospital.

Steve Pandey and Stephen Lake were involved as clinical directors in those changes and they also set up their own private company shortly afterwards.

Campaigners say that they have benefited from those changes, and are worried that it may have influenced the decision to close bowel surgery in Redditch. The trust's position is that the change was only about safety.

All hospitals are struggling with waiting lists, and the same surgeons do the work in the public sector and in the private sector. There's long been a possible conflict of interest. Why get your NHS waiting list down if you're going to profit in the private sector? As more private sector companies get NHS work, it could become more of an issue.

Mr Stote called for the investigation to be made public to reassure patients.

He said: "Why on Earth didn't they close a service that referred people to Worcester, which couldn't cope and then had to refer them onto the clinic?

"It can't be right that people from that clinic are deciding on which people are going to go there. That conflict of interest doesn't appear to have been scrutinised."

The trust denied the increase in referrals to the private clinic was linked to the centralisation of bowel surgery services in 2013, which the spokesman described as "a commissioner-led initiative and was based on clinical evidence".

"Since [centralisation] there have been three independent clinical reviews. There has also been an invited Royal College of Surgery review," they said.

"All reviews confirmed that complex emergency surgery at the Alexandra Hospital needed to be relocated."