NHS trust uses appointment letters to send cancer patients advert for private healthcare An NHS trust has apologised for sending hundreds of leaflets advertising a private clinic to terminally ill patients after a […]

An NHS trust has apologised for sending hundreds of leaflets advertising a private clinic to terminally ill patients after a woman shared them online.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust used the medical data of patients to include promotional materials for Nova Healthcare in appointment letters. Nova Healthcare has a contract with NHS England to provide specialist gamma knife radiotherapy. It offers consultations and daycare for private patients in a wing of St James’s Hospital in Leeds.

The leaflets said: “As a patient of Nova Healthcare you’ll benefit from access to the latest and most innovative technologies and therapies and enjoy consultant-led care from clinicians who are world-renowned specialists.”

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Posters advertising Nova Healthcare were also fixed to the walls of the NHS cancer wards at the hospital.

The woman who shared the letters

Ali Schofield, 33, who has secondary breast cancer, was one of the patients to receive an advertisement in her letter. She shared it on Twitter, and said she was “disgusted” that her private medical records were being used to promote a private company.

Ms Schofield, a journalist, told The Observer:

“The first floor is where the NHS patients go for oncology appointments and chemotherapy. You can’t get into the place now without seeing adverts for Nova Healthcare. “It is preying on people who don’t have the money and might not want private healthcare anyway. It’s wrong. “I felt really cold when I saw the leaflet because it suggested that I would have better healthcare if I was to go private. It offered me access to the latest technologies and made me think: so what am I getting now? It’s disgusting. It puts the seed of doubt into you.” “Adverts like this give the impression that NHS cancer care is second class. It’s unreasonable to have that pushed in your face at your NHS appointment. It was very upsetting to feel someone was trying to make money out of cancer patients receiving NHS care.” She added: “My care has been very good and all the NHS staff I’ve spoken to has been brilliant. Nurses at St James’s feel that the Nova adverts undermine their work.”

NHS England guidelines say it is forbidden to use correspondence to patients to promote private healthcare.

They state: “Trusts that offer private healthcare services should market and promote their private healthcare services completely separately. They should not market or promote these services within their NHS communications to patients and the public, eg appointment letters [and] NHS test results.”

The NHS trust’s response

A spokesperson for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs St James’s, apologised and said that the practice has been stopped. They said:

We are very sorry for any distress caused by the inclusion of the information about private healthcare in our patient letter. As soon as we were able to look into our patient’s concerns, we apologised in person and publicly. We stopped sending the leaflet immediately and are reviewing its use. “The trust has a commercial relationship with Nova Healthcare under which the company leases accommodation on our campus at St James’s University Hospital to provide consulting and daycare for private patients.” “NHS patients receive the same standard of clinical care and have access to the same medical technology as patients who choose to receive their care in private facilities. Since October 2016 we have sent out around one million letters to patients. Fewer than 1,000 Nova leaflets were included in patient letters.”

Nova Healthcare also apologised to Ms Schofield.