The NHS has quietly started charging disabled people for using wheelchairs

A new independent media outlet, London Centric, has broken the news that an NHS trust is charging people to hire wheelchairs – showing that creeping privatisation of healthcare is never too far away.

London Centric: quite a scoop on the NHS

Former Guardian and Buzzfeed journalist Jim Waterson has recently launched London Centric: a new media outlet focusing solely on the capital. Now, the Canary and Jim Waterson have history – but to be fair to him, London Centric looks like a good project. Not least this is because it’s already highlighted a story most of the corporate media would not bother to investigate.

As Waterson wrote:

Rather than have a stock of hospital owned-and-operated wheelchairs King’s College Hospital in Lambeth has installed a Boris Bike-style hiring service run by Wheelshare, a private healthcare business. Unless patients have come in an ambulance, people arriving at the hospital and unable to walk to A&E are pointed towards a hiring dock full of wheelchairs unlocked by a credit card machine.

Although the first four hours are free, after that each wheelchair costs patients £2/hour, with the cost being automatically charged to the user’s credit card. King’s has some of the worst waiting times in country, with some patients waiting up to 12 hours to be seen in A&E.

So, not only is the NHS in a dire state – with chronically ill and disabled people disproportionately affected – but now some trusts want to charge these same, marginalised people to have accessible healthcare.

NHS privatisation is a myth, though – right?

RIGHT?

Refunds, blah, blah, blah

Meanwhile, you can’t launch a new media outlet without the corporate media ripping you off. So, enter the Telegraph to cover Waterson’s scoop. It did give credit to him – but failed to link to his original piece. For shame. We all love a good backlink, after all.

What the Telegraph did note, though, was King College’s response to Waterson’s story. It said:

Wheelchairs are available for patients to access free of charge at King’s College Hospital for four hours, after which each additional hour or part of it costs £2. The scheme helps ensure that every patient who needs a wheelchair can find one when they arrive at hospital.

Patients using a wheelchair who experience longer waits for treatment are able to have these costs refunded by contacting Wheelshare directly.

London Centric found that refunds were not advertised anywhere in the scheme. Surprise, surprise.

Overall, the NHS charging for wheelchairs is just another thin end of a wedge when it comes to the degradation of healthcare in the UK.

NHS wheelchair charges: privatisation by stealth

Who remembers when TV used to be free in hospital? Well, you only would if you stayed prior to 2004. Free eye tests were also a thing in the 1960s – as were prescriptions.

All this coupled with sky-high waiting times show an NHS buckling under the strain of corporate capitalism – and that’s just the experience if you’re non-disabled. Chronically ill and disabled people face systemic barriers in accessing healthcare. Now, Kings want to make that even more difficult.

As one person summed up to London Centric:

You can’t call an ambulance because of the waiting times. If you get to the hospital in a car you need to pay for transport while you wait in A&E. There’s literally a wheelchair shortage in a hospital

And now, you’ll have to pay for that, too.

Whether or not this constitutes discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 remains to be seen. However, what it does constitute is managers privatising the NHS via stealth after politicians have starved it of money. And with another trust in London also rolling this out, it seems that wheelchair charges may be the shape of things to come.

Featured image via the Canary