NHS - Taxpayer money given away. Cygnet Health UK

Cygnet Health Care is a private provider of mental health services. It operates over 150 centres with more than 2,500 beds across the UK. Cygnet also has 15 rehabilitation sites nationwide, comprising 25 wards and 338 beds.

Some clients pay for private services, but the majority are funded by the NHS.

It is this NHS funded service that we are looking at here, but first, some corporate information.

In 2014, the business was acquired by Universal Health Services, an American Corporate Healthcare giant, for £205,000,000.

In 2016, Cygnet purchased the Cambian Group, Adult Services business for £377,000,000.

Cygnet does not appear to pay any dividends to UHS, but it does send large chunks of "interest" to it's American parent annually. In 2022, the "interest" (on internally funded loans), amounted to £48,000,000.

This is where we get interested. We cannot work out why the UK Government would pay an American corporate beast (via it's UK business, Cygnet), huge amounts of taxpayers money, for services that the NHS would be quite able to operate itself. 

Let's see what £48,000,000 would buy in relation to staff.

We assumed, (for illustrative purposes), an average salary for Nursing and Care staff of *£30,000 pa.

£48,000,000 would pay approximately 1,600 staff for one year. 

Further investigation though, shows that the turnover recorded by Cygnet for the 2022 tax year was £170,000,000. Lets be generous and estimate that 60% of that came from services supplied to and paid for, NHS budgets. That's £102,000,000. 

Using the same assumed salaries as above, that would pay for a minimum of 3,400 staff. 

How could the staff shortages WITHIN the NHS be affected, if that budget was redirected from the private sector into the NHS?

We will examine this in another blog.

*Based on an "Average" Care worker salary of £25k and an "Average" RN salary of £35k. However, we envisage that those numbers would increase significantly, if it's assumed that there would be considerably more Care workers employed, than Registered Nurses across the sector.