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Solihull Care Trust is to ‘market test’ services including community-based dermatology, cataracts, alcohol ‘management programmes’ and learning disability services.
It follows Government guidance that services should be put out to tender – but national chiefs say the NHS should be a ‘preferred provider’.
The trust will look at whether the services should be put out to tender.
While councils have outsourced such services since the 1980s, Labour reforms have seen similar practices to the NHS.
Unions have warned this is a step towards privatisation.
The trust says it will ‘support more cost efficient and efficient provision of health and adult social care services’.
Yet the trust says it is ‘sometimes necessary to introduce competition to secure improved patient outcomes/experience’.
Yet it says: “There is a possibility that following the general election that policy guidance may change.”
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