Doors close on £50m commuter treatment centres
Four out of six walk-in centres operated by Atos Origin have now closed.
A makeshift notice on the door of Manchester Piccadilly walk-in health centre directs commuters needing medical attention to visit their local Boots.
The clinic was the first of a series of commuter walk-in centres to open. It now lies empty, as does its sister project in London’s Canary Wharf.
The two centres, run by provider Atos Origin, were part of a £50m Labour government scheme contracted to various providers to give busy workers better access to healthcare.
But five years on, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal that four of the total six centres have closed, being “surplus to demand”.
The investigation, published in the Telegraph, also found that ambitious targets of numbers to be treated were not met: one clinic treating only 40 percent of its quota.
The walk-in clinics were created as a part of the Independent Sector Treatment Centre (ISTC) scheme, which outsourced procedures to private providers to reduce NHS waiting times.
Alongside 25 fixed-site ISTCs, six commuter walk-in centres were set up.
Get the data: Commuter walk-in centre closures
Contracts worth a total of £47.6m to run these six centres were awarded to companies Care UK, Atos Origin, Walk-in Health and Netcare, to treat issues including minor illnesses, sprains, stomach upsets and influenza.
But over the past six months, centres in London’s Liverpool Street, Manchester, Newcastle and London’s Canary Wharf have shut down. Contracts for centres in Leeds and London’s Victoria will come up for renewal later this year.
The clinic in Liverpool Street is now privately owned. The two clinics in Manchester and Canary Wharf, contracted to Atos Origin, however lie empty and unused.
Case Study: Atos walk-in centres
In October 2005 Atos Origin, an information technology business with annual revenues of £4.4bn, was awarded a £7.5 million contract to provide 162,000 treatments at a commuter walk-in centre near Manchester Piccadilly Station.
The following year Atos was awarded a second contract, worth £8.2m, for another centre in London’s Canary Wharf.
In September 2010, the Manchester contract ended, Atos having performed 112,000 treatments – 69 percent of the envisaged amount – according to the Department of Health.
At the Canary Wharf centre, Atos was contracted for 226,000 visits. However, when the centre closed at the end of March, the number of patient visits totalled just 90,000: less than 40 percent.
Atos did not wish to comment on the number of treatments performed, or the reasons for closure.
A spokesperson said: “Atos Healthcare successfully fulfilled its contractual obligations up to contract expiry at both these centres. The premises for these two centres were leased by Atos Healthcare and are now being returned to the leaseholders.”
The Department of Health agreed that Atos had met its contractual obligation “to provide services from 7am and 7pm on Monday to Friday.”
A spokesperson said: “We have no plans to enter into this type of contract again. Under our plans to modernise the NHS, any new elective services commissioned from independent sector providers would be paid at NHS prices, with no income guarantees, thus preventing payment for activity that did not occur.”
Technical problems
Following the walk-in centre contract, Atos was awarded a £257m contract to run second wave ISTCs. However, in July 2007, the contract was terminated for “failure of conditions precedent,” according to the Department of Health.
Atos received £2.5m compensation for the cancelled contract.
Two months before the decision was announced, NHS bosses suspended ultrasound tests being carried out at Atos centres in the North West. Following technical and administrative problems, the NHS had to rescan up to 900 people for kidney, prostate and abdominal conditions.
It is not known if there was any connection between the two matters. The Department of Health told the Bureau it “cannot confirm” whether or not the two events were linked.
Government enquiry
In autumn 2008, Atos was subject to a government enquiry after a memory-stick holding data from the Department of Work and Pensions’ “Gateway” website was found in a pub car park. The site contains personal details of almost 12 million people, including information on tax returns and child benefits.
Notwithstanding any concerns, Atos was awarded a three-year contract in November 2010 to provide occupational health services at the East London NHS Foundation Trust.
Services include “sickness absence management, health surveillance, immunisations and a wellbeing programme”, which the company will deliver to the Trust’s 2,700 employees.
