Hinchingbrooke Hospital is a small district general hospital in Hinchingbrooke near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. Opened in 1983, it serves the Huntingdonshire area, and has a range of specialities as well as an emergency department and a maternity unit. The hospital is managed by the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust. History Formation The hospital was opened in 1983 to replace Huntingdon County Hospital which closed that year. It was administered by Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust which developed financial problems and was obliged to borrow £27.3 million in Public Dividend Capital in the year ended 31 March 2007. Private sector management In accordance with the powers contained in the National Health Service Acts 2001 and 2006 and the Health and Social Care Act 2001, the Government decided that this was an opportunity "to bring in another person or organisation to manage an NHS hospital". A completion was arranged by the NHS East of England Strategic Projects Team. It was announced on 25 November 2010 that Circle Health had been selected to manage the hospital under a 10-year contract. Mitie continued to provide domestic cleaning services, waste collection, pest control and external window cleaning at the hospital. Although the hospital was managed privately, the buildings remained in the ownership of the NHS. This process was widely criticised as a significant step in the privatisation of the NHS in England. BBC Newsnight produced a programme about the hospital in August 2012 where Ali Parsa of Circle Health showed how "reactive, motivated staff treat patients better; happy, well-fed patients heal better". However in November 2012 a National Audit Office (NAO) report into the franchising arrangement was published. It found that while Circle had made early improvements in some clinical areas, the projected deficit for the year ending 31 March 2013 was already £2.2 million higher than planned. Circle would have to make unprecedented levels of savings to eliminate the deficit and most of those savings were expected in the later years of the ten-year franchise, so the value for money of the project would not be capable of being easily be assessed for some time. The NAO also found that while NHS East of England had assessed bidders' savings proposals, the relative risks had not been fully considered, which had the potential to encourage over-optimistic bids. Matters started to deteriorate further. In the 2013 NHS staff survey involving 28 key findings, Hinchingbrooke came out