Interhealth Canada is an international provider of healthcare services specialising in orthopaedics and trauma. Its Head Office is located in
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
with regional offices in Dubai, Kuwait and the United Kingdom.
Wilson Parasiuk was a director from 1994 to 2002.
Kuwait
The company designed, built, commissioned and initially operated the Royale Hayat Hospital which opened in November 2006.
Turks and Caicos Islands
FirstCaribbean International Bank
CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank (FCIB) is a financial services company based in Barbados and the Caribbean subsidiary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). The bank was founded in 2002 as FirstCaribbean International Bank t ...
arranged US$124 million financing for the Turks and Caicos Islands Hospitals Public Private Partnership Project. Dr. Denise Braithwaite-Tennant was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the hospital in December 2020.
The company has a 25-year contract to run a hospital from April 2010 as part of the National Health System on the
Turks and Caicos Islands
The Turks and Caicos Islands (abbreviated TCI; and ) are a British Overseas Territory consisting of the larger Caicos Islands and smaller Turks Islands, two groups of tropical islands in the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean and n ...
. It built two surgical centres — one in Provo with 20 beds and the other in Grand Turk with 10 beds — under a public-private partnership for which they are paid $80 million annually. In January 2014, it was reported that a supplementary allocation of $6.2 million was required by the Ministry of Health to meet further cost of services delivery by the company. This is a level two hospital so there is an arrangement for nurses to spend six months in the hospital at the
University of the West Indies to complete their training.
Their operation, which enables Canadians to travel to the Islands for treatment, has been criticised in Canada by Sandra Azocar, executive director of Friends of Medicare, who says: "Private clinics, whether in Canada or Turks and Caicos Island, distort the public system. They don’t save money; they fix no problem that the public system itself can’t fix; and they introduce a whole world of new problems."
Edwin Astwood complained about the company's inefficiency, exorbitant prices and malfunctioning machines in 2019 saying that "people who we already paid for cannot get these basic services".
United Kingdom
The subsidiary company Interhealth Care Services (UK) Ltd ran the Kidderminster Independent Sector NHS Treatment Centre and the Cheshire & Merseyside NHS Treatment Centre in Halton from 2006 to 2011, which delivered over 30,000 orthopaedic procedures during that period. This was one of a number of
Independent sector treatment centre
Independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) are private-sector owned treatment centres contracted within the English National Health Service to treat NHS patients free at the point of use. They are sometimes referred to as 'surgicentres' or ‘sp ...
s established by the Labour Government to reduce waiting lists for elective surgery about which there was considerable controversy and an enquiry by the House of Commons Health Committee.
Wyre Forest’s independent MP
Richard Taylor reluctantly conceded in 2009 that the InterHealth centre located in an empty ward at Kidderminster Hospital (which he fought to keep open as an acute centre) had done a "very good job" replacing hips and knees, fast and well, without the high failure rate experienced elsewhere.
The Merseyside centre was notable for the speed of construction. The first patients were admitted only 17 months from the start of design work on the £44m construction project. Pressure was put on local GPs to refer patients to the centre, rather than to NHS hospitals, because the
primary care trust had to pay for this activity whether or not it is used and, the contract was worth c£30million pa and generated operating profits for the company in excess of £9m pa. When the contract finished the facility was taken over by
Warrington & Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was created on 1 December 2008 from what was formerly known as North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust. The trust comprises Warrington Hospital, Halton General Hospital in Runcorn and Houghton Hal ...
. This was in spite of the centre achieving the highest patient satisfaction ratings of all NHS providers, zero
MRSA
Methicillin-resistant ''Staphylococcus aureus'' (MRSA) is a group of Gram-positive bacteria that are genetically distinct from other strains of ''Staphylococcus aureus''. MRSA is responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. ...
or C-diff in over 20,000 procedures, and a petition signed by over 10,000 to retain Interhealth Canada as the operator. Having paid around £32 million to repurchase the building at the end of the five-year contract, the centre sat empty for several years.
It has a contract to run Braintree Community Hospital from 2010 until 2015 with options to extend to 2017.
This contract was sold to Serco.
References
{{reflist, 30em
External links
Interhealth Canada
Health care companies of Canada
Private providers of NHS services