Heart scanner gifted by RBS raises fear of two-tier NHS

PRIVATE donations of health equipment used by the NHS should be subject to guidelines amid fears of a two-tier service, an MSP has urged.

It follows the gifting of one of the world's best scanners to Edinburgh by Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS staff will have access to the machine for 25 per cent of the time, but NHS Lothian insisted that did not mean bank workers would get preferential treatment.

But Margo MacDonald, the independent MSP for the Lothians, plans to raise the question of conditional gifts at Holyrood.

The Aquilion One scanner, bought for the Queen's Medical Research Institute (QMRI) and NHS Lothian by part of the £4 million donation, will be helping to diagnose heart problems by the end of the year.

Professor Allyson Pollock, a public health expert, yesterday said the deal undermined the principles of equal access to NHS services.

However, NHS Lothian rejected her claims, saying no NHS patient would be disadvantaged by the RBS allocation. It added that without the funding, the scanner would not be coming come to Scotland at all.

The £1.6 million scanner can capture images of organs in just 0.35 seconds. The QMRI will use it – the first to come to the UK – to research conditions such as heart disease. It will be used to carry out an extra 4,000 scans on NHS patients a year.

But while the institute and NHS Lothian will benefit from 75 per cent of the scanner's capacity, around 25 per cent will be used by RBS as part of its health-screening programme for staff.

Ms Macdonald said she would be laying a motion in Holyrood that would recognise the generosity of RBS, but also call for further discussions. "I think it would be better to debate this in parliament and work out if there are any ground rules that are needed for possible donations in the future," she said.

Dr Jean Turner, of the Scottish Patients Association, welcomed the fact that the scanner was coming to Scotland, but said it was a "gift with strings".

Dr Charles Swainson, the medical director of NHS Lothian, said categorically that no NHS patients would be disadvantaged because of the deal with RBS. He said the scanner would be used for research and no NHS money would be used to fund it for the first five years. "I don't think it is unreasonable for a major donor to ask for something back for its staff so long as it does not compete with the NHS, which in this case it doesn't," he said.

The Scottish Conservatives said the RBS donation was welcome and would improve the treatment of patients. Mary Scanlon, the health spokeswoman, said: "It is churlish to pass judgment on RBS for a generous donation – pure ideology at its worst."

Nicola Sturgeon, the health secretary, said: "The RBS gift will be a major additional resource to the NHS, which would not otherwise be available."

A spokeswoman for RBS said it would have access to around 1,000 scans a year for its 100,000 staff in the UK. She added:

"This will only be provided to those who qualify under criteria for heart screening."

Opening door to corporate control?

DONATIONS "with strings" will become increasingly common as the NHS enters a more stringent financial period, opening the door to corporate control over public services, experts warned yesterday.

Professor Allyson Pollock, a public health doctor and head of the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh, said:

"If RBS staff are going to get access to a quarter of the capacity of this scanner then that goes against equal access for equal need.

Some people are going to have better access to the scanner than others based on ability to pay because RBS has bought out time."

She added that "philanthropy with strings" presented "a real risk that the underlying principles of the NHS are disrupted".

"We must keep the principle of the NHS being free at the point of need and based on equal access. If this scanner is an NHS priority, then it is the NHS that should fund it," she said.

Professor David Miller, of Strathclyde University, said corporations were exerting creeping control over government and public services which would lead to "the undermining of democracy".

"This is part of the attempt to control and destroy public services," he warned. "There is no mechanism for people to vote against corporations. It's direct corporate rule. We should be concerned."

Marc Lawn, a business expert based in Cambridgeshire, said the RBS funding could be about "corporations abusing power" but he did not believe this was the case.

He said the government had "made little secret" of its intention that the NHS would eventually run like a corporation and this was a move towards that.

Alan Maynard, professor of health economics at York University, agreed it was likely the NHS would engage in similar deals which would present "clear social choices".

"People have to come to terms with these kind of choices. It will obviously create moral and ideological dilemmas," he said.