It came as a thundering shock. Wellsbourne GP practice in Whitehawk, East Brighton, has just been told it is losing its contract. NHS Sussex, the local integrated care board (ICB), is provisionally handing it over to a distant Leeds-based company whose main business is in owning and managing healthcare properties. This is a story about how parts of the NHS can slip away to profit-makers, despite the government’s aim to put community first. The company, One Medical Group, won the bid by undercutting on price and proposing to add a walk-in centre. It’s not a lone case: some other ICBs erroneously put good NHS community services out for tender, and feel obliged to take the lowest bid.

To give you a rough portrait, in 2019 Whitehawk was ranked within the top 10% of England’s most deprived areas, and the most deprived in Brighton. According to a doctor from the practice, life expectancy in the area is 10% lower than it is on the other side of the city. The renowned Marmot review on health inequalities and their underlying social causes drew on Whitehawk as a study of deprivation. It’s the type of place that needs exceptionally socially committed GPs.

It’s not, in other words, where you would expect a private company to make money. Indeed, the last private company managing the GP practice quit, leaving services in disarray. The GPs of Wellsbourne now work as part of a not-for-profit community interest company. “We’re here because this is the kind of work we want to do,” said Posy Greany, a doctor at the surgery. Although they would be re-employed by the new company, she tells me they are likely to leave, as “working for a private for-profit provider doesn’t fit with our view of the NHS”. As Greany wrote in a local publication,

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