A NEW campaign has unveiled a map depicting the number of privatised NHS services across Carlisle. 

Each of the 2,495 pins on the map across the UK shows a healthcare service being provided by an external provider, including four places within Carlisle - according to Everydoctor.  

Among the outsourced services are the PET-CT scanning services at Cumberland Infirmary, operated under an NHS England contract with Alliance Medical.

Alliance has scanning centres scattered across 30 locations in England.

Carlisle NHS Clinic is another.

It relies on Blatchford for its clinical teams, a company known for manufacturing mobility solutions including prosthetics and orthotics, catering both for private and NHS patients. 

Warwick Road Surgery and Fusehill Medical Practice, two general practice sites, are operated and managed by SSP Health.

The health firm boasts management of 37 GP practice sites in the North West.

Julie Minns, Labour's candidate for Carlisle, said she connected this to her personal circumstances as her elderly mother is currently receiving treatment for several health ailments.

"14 years of Tory misrule have delivered a two-tier health system," she claimed.

"Labour founded the NHS to right the wrong that people who were poorer could not afford healthcare. 75 years on the Tories’ failure to invest sufficiently in staff, technology and capacity, have created a new wrong where the majority wait months for NHS treatment, while those who can afford it, pay to be seen quicker."

Earlier this month, Wes Streeting defended Labour's own plan to use the private sector to cut the NHS backlog. 

"A Labour government will deliver investment in the NHS, but it will take time to build back the capacity that 14 years of Conservative chaos has drained from our national health service," Ms Minns said.

"Labour will put people not ideology first, and if we need to use the private sector to help cut the NHS care backlog in the short-term we will, but in the longer-term investment, reform and prevention will enable us to deliver an NHS so good that no one feels forced to go private, and to make sure the NHS has the capacity it needs so that it does not need to pay for people to go private either," she said.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently claimed Labour’s policy on private sector involvement in the NHS is a “total and utter mess”.

At a session of Prime Minister's Questions in November, Mr Sunak said of Labour leader Keir Starmer: “First, he promised – in his words – to ban NHS use of the independent sector then he said he wants more use of the independent sector, his shadow health secretary (Wes Streeting) agreed with that but then the deputy leader (Angela Rayner) said she would end it.

“As ever, you simply don’t know what Labour stands for and you can’t trust a word they say.”