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Money Power Health with Nason MaaniAuthor: Nason Maani
A podcast on how our health is influenced by commercial forces, wealth and power, hosted by Dr Nason Maani and featuring conversations from a range of perspectives. Language: en Genres: Science Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Episode 18: UK NHS privatisation, health and the public interest with David Rowland
Episode 18
Monday, 26 January, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health. Before we delve into this episode, you will also see that we have launched a substack with essays on the themes of money power and health. You can sign up to that and read them, for free and ad free, in the link in the show notes. Today’s episode is about the quiet but profound transformation of the UKs national health service. This has been less through a single piece of legislation, but through decades of contracting, outsourcing, and creeping privatisation that often escapes public scrutiny. My guest is David Rowland, Executive Director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, an independent non-party think tank prmoting a vision of health focused on accountability and the public interest. CHPI has done some of the most rigorous work in the UK tracking how private companies have become embedded within the NHS, from clinical services to back-office functions, and what that means for cost, accountability, transparency, and ultimately, patient care.In this conversation, we talk about how privatisation actually happens in practice using examples from CHPIs work, and why headline debates about “selling off the NHS” miss the more important question: how market logics and profit-seeking reshape public institutions from the inside out. He discusses what it is like to work with with people who have been harmed through such arrangements and discuss why the impacts of privatisation are not evenly distributed.I hope you enjoy the conversation. Links to some of the topics covered in this conversation are below: Profit leakage in eye care report: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/the-local-and-national-impact-of-profit-leakage-in-the-outsourcing-of-nhs-eye-care-services-to-the-private-sectorADHD outsourcing report: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/how-the-under-regulated-market-in-nhs-funded-adhd-servicesReport on the UK care home industry: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/plugging-the-leaks-in-the-uk-care-home-industryMusic in this podcast was by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his art and music here: https://www.danielmaani.com
