Healthscope’s sale is a golden opportunity to learn from the past.
The imminent sale of Healthscope, one of Australia’s largest ever hospital groups, is an opportunity to decide private equity’s involvement in our health services, and a chance to reset standards by listening to patients.
For those in the driver’s seat of the sale, scrutinising the motivations of the new ownership, ensuring patient expectations are met and that doctors are attracted to those facilities must be central to the decision-making process.
Such opportunities are few and far between, and it would be a crying shame not to reflect honestly on where we (the sector) can collectively support better care.
Over the past five years, almost 100,000 patients have reported their hospital experiences and outcomes to Australia’s largest private-sector measurement platform – the Voice of the Patient.
Why? Because patient voices are the ones that matter most and best reflect where and how to improve.
Across all the experiences reported – from hundreds of hospitals nationwide – one theme prevails: the best healthcare focuses on value as judged by the patient.
Over a course of years, during Brookfield’s ownership of Healthscope, thousands upon thousands of patient responses consistently put the hospital group in the bottom tier of operators nationally.
At one point, it lagged almost 10 percentage points behind the highest rated private hospital group in the country on overall patient experience.
When it came to individual clinical categories, it lagged across some of the most important areas for private health insurers, including orthopaedic, general surgery, urology, obstetrics and cardiac services.
Australia has among the best standards of care of anywhere in the world. With it comes immense scrutiny and the responsibility for all stakeholders to strictly uphold patient value, experience and outcomes.
But when we asked patients if their views and concerns were listened to while in a Healthscope hospital; if they felt informed, cared for, confident in their safety or the treatment provided or the communication provided by their healthcare professionals; or if they felt they had been included in shared decision-making practices, their answers measured repeatedly and broadly below that of other peer groups.
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It’s therefore hard not to ponder whether private equity’s involvement in our second largest hospital group contributed to patient assessments and experiences. Indeed, few others than those directly involved in Healthscope’s operation will know.
But what is certain is that this question is being asked globally.
Earlier this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association published evidence from the US illustrating the damaging implications of private equity ownership across 73 hospitals.
Patients ranked those facilities lower for experience and sentiment, and as time went on, that decline became increasingly pronounced.
It concluded: “Patient care experience worsened after private equity acquisition of hospitals. These findings raise concern about the implications of private equity acquisitions on patient care experience at US hospitals.”
Brookfield’s exit from Healthscope is, therefore, a chance to review the implications of private equity on Australia’s hospitals and who we accept to deliver care.
The future owners of Healthscope’s business, therefore, have an incredibly important job on their hands.
The decision of who owns these hospitals cannot solely depend on who’s willing to pay the most.
It must also reflect honestly on whether they are going to play a positive role in the Australian healthcare system. We must not risk Australian healthcare being treated as a commodity business to shore up balance sheets.
For stakeholders across Australia’s health system – providers, payers and patients – it must be an opportunity to collaborate better to improve patient experience, optimise outcomes and enhance service quality supported by innovative funding models.
Andrew Sando is the CEO of the Australian Health Service Alliance, a member-owned, not-for-profit service organisation and the largest health insurance buying group in Australia.
This article was first published by the AHSA. Read the original here.