Thread by @nick_grundy

Having slept on the appalling decision by @NHSEngland to reward #Capita's unbroken track record of failure by extending their contract, this needs called what it is: an unelected and unaccountable quango doing the indefensible. 1/n

Capita have failed patients, for more than a decade, most glaringly by mishandling the cervical screening programme, and thereby failing 40,000 women. bbc.co.uk/news/health-46… 2/n

They couldn't even manage to move patients' notes from one practice to another, and they lost 400,000 clinical letters: pulsetoday.co.uk/news/uncategor…
@NHSEngland 's attempts to fix that resulted in their sending patient data *to a supermarket* which had the same postcode as a GP 3/n

They failed the armed forces, too. I had patients wanting to sign up who were unable to because no one knew where their notes were to write the medical report. 4/n

All this, of course, is patient-facing failure which caused direct harm to people by putting screening programmes and the safety of care at risk. Evidently NHSE don't care when their corporate chums endanger patients. 6/n

#Capita's catastrophic mishandling of primary care pensions are of course less important, but even here they've managed to cause serious harm to people. 7/n

Primarily this is because their inability to receive payments and accurately attribute them to a person's pension record has caused hundreds of thousands of hours of GP and practice time to be taken up doing their job for them over the past decade. 8/n

That is a workforce issue. It drives people out of work, out of NHS work, and into early retirement. Extending #Capita's contract despite a decade of sustained, irresponsible failure can only be taken as a sign @AmandaPritchard and NHSE don't care about the workforce crisis. 9/n

There's no other explanation. I've supported GPs dying of cancer who #Capita had told to go back and get pension records from a practice which had closed two years earlier before they could take ill health retirement. 10/n

I've supported GPs getting divorced whose houses the courts have threatened to repossess because they couldn't get a pension statement, because #Capita are incompetent and didn't care. 11/n

I've supported people serving their country abroad told to do the same- just call your employer from a decade ago at 4am your time from a fucking warzone because we can't do our jobs properly. 11/n

I did this work unpaid because I care about how staff are treated in the NHS.

@NHSEngland don't care how staff are treated in the NHS.

If they did, even for a second, they could not in good conscience have taken this decision. 12/n

It's a slap in the face for everyone who's worked on this voluntarily and professionally, for @NAOorguk who called out #Capita and @NHSE's cosy incompetence in their report, and for the tens of thousands of GPs who have had to do Capita's job for them over the past 12 years. 13/n

To be clear: @NHSEngland are responsible for a pensions system which treats staff without compassion or dignity. Extending Capita's contract is indefensible because they are incompetent, but more so because it shows they don't care how NHS staff are treated. 14/n

If you work for @NHSEngland and are a GP or any sort of clinician, then if you have any integrity at all you should resign. If you don't, you are tacitly defending how your organisation treats practice staff, and how it allows patients to be harmed by the choices it makes. 15/15