Streeting appoints ex-boss of health privatiser, who pushed non-doctor expansion, to run Dept of Health

Samantha Jones, who pushed use of ‘associates’ without medical training and ran GP business with half usual no of GPs, to run DHSC as part of NHS cost-cutting ‘integrated care’ plan

Right-wing Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting has appointed a health privatiser, who was previously a senior adviser to Boris Johnson and has been behind the pushing of the use of non-doctor ‘physician associates’ (PAs) both in the NHS and in the private GP surgery business she ran, to run the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

Samantha Jones has become Private Secretary at the DHSC – almost the highest civil service rank – to run the department for Streeting, who has taken cash from private health interests and is an ardent advocate of the PA model as part of his slash-and-burn ‘Ten year plan’ for the NHS, which he has appointed another notorious health privatiser to run.

From 2015 to 2019, Jones ran the ‘New Models of Care’ (NMC) programme for the Tories’ so-called ‘5-year Forward View’, working for Simon Stevens – the former CEO of US private health giant UnitedHealth, often-sued for its “immoral and barbaric” withholding of care and fraud, whose current CEO says its role is to block ‘unsustainable’ treatment. As part of its cost-cutting plans, NMC focused heavily on the replacement of doctors with PAs, as part of the implementation of the US-derived ‘Integrated Care’ plan that involves cutting and rationing healthcare and rewards ‘providers’ for not treating people, by giving them a share of the ‘savings’ as profit.

NMC is euphemistically described by its advocates as supplementing actual doctors with ‘new healthcare professionals’ working under ‘defined levels of supervision’:

However, in many cases PAs are used instead of doctors to cut costs and increase profit, with minimal if any supervision and often well beyond the scope of their supposed competence. Several patients have already died as a result of misdiagnoses by PAs – yet doctors groups have been rebuked by health ‘leadership’ for wanting NHS Trusts to use PAs to operate to a national safety standard or to ensure training is available for real doctors:

GMC tells doctors they’ve no business saying how NHS trusts use non-doctors or ensure training of proper docs

In 2019, Samantha Jones moved to become CEO of Operose, which took over a string of GP surgeries to become. as of 2022, the largest provider of GP surgeries to the NHS. True to her roots in NMC’s use of PAs, Operose – later sold to what used to be Virgin Care – used PAs in its surgeries at around six times the NHS average and, as a 2022 Panorama investigation shortly after her departure discovered, offers its patients only half of the average number of GPs per patient. PAs working for Operose expressed concern at the lack of supervision they received.

Operose is owned by Centene, another US giant accused of denial of care, even to sick children, and of overbilling. The firm has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for over-charging US state and federal governments and has been sued for misleading patients about the benefits of its health plans.

Integrated Care (ICS), of which the move to cut costs through the use of PAs forms part, is the UK import of the US ‘Accountable Care Organisations’ system – and was called ‘Accountable Care Organisations’ (ACOs) until it was renamed after awareness began to spread that ACOs were a system for withholding care from patients and that care providers were incentivised to cut care because they receive a share of the ‘savings’. The system remained unchanged, but the rebranding disguised the reality.

Samantha Jones is as ardent an advocate of ICS as she is of the use of PAs – and said this is because it is the same thing she has been doing in her jobs for private health corporations:

We are a fundamental part of supporting and enabling integration of care models because this is a continuation of things that I have done throughout my professional life.

When the Green party, early last year, tried to block the Tory government’s plan to expand the use of PAs in the NHS despite the dangers to patients, Keir Starmer and Streeting ordered Labour peers to collaborate with the Tories to defeat the Greens’ measure:

Labour and Tories combine in Lords to defeat attempt to protect your right to see a doctor

Starmer’s Labour government knows that the use of PAs is dangerous to patients – because the government’s own analysis shows it is – yet is pushing ahead with it anyway:

Govt’s own analysis says its non-doctor ‘associate’ plan poses HIGH risk for patients

Jones appears to have retained her own private healthcare interests and is still listed as a partner at Gsquare Capital, which has fifteen private health businesses:

‘Mainstream’ media headlines about Jones’s appointment have conspicuously omitted to mention her history as a health privatiser and pusher of PAs at the expense of patients’ access to real doctors:

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