For-profit healthcare and the impact on women

CHPI is increasingly concerned about the way in which the growth of for-profit health and social care in the UK presents specific risks for women, both as users of services and as the paid and unpaid workers providing them.

Known risks of market-based models include the under-provision of less profitable services, which can mean less treatment and care for women’s more complex health needs. Pre-existing gender inequalities mean that inadequate regulation of private providers can disproportionately risk the quality of treatment experienced by women patients, and their safety. Profit motivated cuts to staffing, pay and conditions impact women more because they make up most of the workforce. The impacts of cuts to services driven by profit concerns or profit leaks from public budgets can also significantly add to the workloads of unpaid carers, the vast majority of whom are women.

To date CHPI’s work in this area has helped expose how private sector business models and associated regulatory failures lie at the heart of multiple UK patient safety scandals disproportionately harming women. These include the Ledward and Paterson cases, PIP breast implants, pelvic mesh, hormone pregnancy tests and sodium valproate in pregnancy.

CHPI’s analysis has shown that despite care home workers, primarily women, working harder and longer hours in response to COVID-19, their for-profit employers used additional government financial support during the pandemic to increase dividend payouts rather than protecting and rewarding staff.

Our investigations have also shown how a significant portion of NHS funding for the treatment and care of survivors at Sexual Assault Referral Centres is instead being extracted as profit by private-equity owned firms.   

Going forward we would like/are committed to do further research and analysis to understand and raise awareness of the largely neglected additional risks faced by women, especially those facing multiple forms of discrimination, because of the UK’s market-based models of health and social care.